Establishing Transdiciplinary Professionalism for Improving Health Outcomes: Workshop Summary

摘要

Efforts to improve patient care and population health are traditional tenets of all the health professions, as is a focus on professionalism. But in a time of rapidly changing environments and evolving technologies, health professionals and those who train them are being challenged to work beyond their traditional comfort zones, often in teams. A new professionalism might be a mechanism for achieving improved health outcomes by applying a transdisciplinary professionalism throughout health care and wellness that emphasizes cross-disciplinary responsibilities and accountability. Transdisciplinary professionalism was defined by invited individual experts as an approach to creating and carrying out a shared social contract that ensures multiple health disciplines, working in concert, are worthy of the trust of patients and the public. This definition was based on the American Board of Medical Specialties definition of professionalism (ABMS, 2013). Such a professionalism would facilitate improved inter- professional teamwork (multiple professional disciplines working together, each using its own expertise, to address common problems) and might even synthesize and extend discipline-specific expertise to create new ways of thinking and acting.