Medical education and professionalism across different cultures

摘要

Two papers in this issue deal with cross-cultural comparisons of medical education and professionalism. Ho et al. report on students' responses to ethical dilemmas in five 'vignettes' in medical practice. They collected data from medical students in Taiwan, to whom they had presented a series of professional dilemmas of North American origin, and compared these with similar data collected from Canadian medical students. In doing so, Ho et al aimed to explore the reasoning processes underlying observable professional behaviours in order to determine the degree to which enacted professional standards are universal.