title: How do we care for our future caregivers? Rethinking education in bioethics with regard to professionalism and institutions.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Bioethics is an integral part of most medical curricula. It complements medical skills training to help future caregivers make morally good decisions in their encounters with patients. Principle-based concepts are commonly regarded as the mainstream approach to bioethics in today's world. However, despite its clear merits, principlism alone is not sufficient for educating future caregivers. Hence, additional perspectives of health care education are required and will be taken into account in this paper.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  Two shortcomings of typical health care training must be addressed: insufficient consideration of the nature of the health care profession and of institutional requirements. Notions and relevance of professionalism in health care have been intensively discussed in recent years. In this paper, I argue that a caring understanding of professionalism is essential for good quality care for the patient and for the physicians themselves. With reference to the ethics of care, the scope of caring professionalism and its implications for health care education are considered and placed within an analytical framework that combines the individual and the institutional context of health care.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  To educate our future caregivers, we must address aspects of professionalism more intensively in medical and nursing schools, and even more so during residencies. This is not just a task of training in knowledge or competencies, but also involves the character formation of the individual and the whole organization. Rethinking health care education from this perspective will allow us to answer the question 'How do we care for our future caregivers?' with an easier conscience.
authors.affiliation: University of Vienna, Institute for Ethics and Law in Medicine.
authors.forename: Jürgen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wallner
mesh_terms: D001675:Bioethics / Q000193:education*; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000941:ethics* / Q000592:standards; D004501:Education, Medical / Q000592:standards*; D004506:Education, Nursing / Q000592:standards*; D004995:Ethics, Professional / Q000193:education; D006801:Humans