We use the word professionalism a lot, and we all appreciate the importance of being professional. However, if asked to describe what it means, most of us struggle. Look in any dictionary and you will find definitions such as “relating to or belonging to a profession”, “a professional is a member of a profession or any person who earns their living from a specified professional activity”, or “a person who has achieved an acclaimed level of skills and knowledge”.

The definition is broad and increasingly used to refer to a wide range of business and sportrelated occupations. We use ‘professional’ as an adverb, an adjective and a noun. We use it as a term of praise, a term of pride and, occasionally, as a term of contempt. We sometimes declare that we know it when we see it, but our thinking is clouded by the difficulty of defining professionalism in a way that can be measured.

Clarity is immensely helpful. We all appreciate that this subject area is important, and developing and strengthening professional traits and behaviours has become a major challenge for both healthcare educators and employers.

Regulators also have a vested interest in professionalism, and this is reflected across the whole spectrum of healthcare.

To start, it is helpful to look briefly beyond our profession, and to the General Medical Council, which makes several recommendations for medical students on this topic.

Professionalism is sometimes presented (and assessed) as a matrix of different competences that medical students need to develop and should be able to demonstrate. This includes:

• Being able to perform competently (and being aware of any limitations in competence) as befits the different stages of your experience and career
• Awareness of what is required for your professional development and how to record it
• Understanding your professional responsibility and how you are regulated
• Knowing where to access support and how to request assistance and supervision as appropriate
• Being able to work with others, your tutors and as part of a team
• Understanding how your own wellbeing and resilience influence your work
• Giving and receiving feedback and knowing how to ask for help and recognising when it is required
• Establishing the foundations of continuous personal and professional development.

Professionalism, then, is a pretty complex subject, encompassing competence, ethics, integrity, probity, reliability, commitment to serving patients and consistency of practice. It includes our relationships with patients and their relatives, with colleagues and managers, as well as observing the appropriate boundaries in each of these relationships.

Professionalism also requires us to reflect on our practice, ensuring that we maintain the knowledge and skills to provide high standards of care, which itself requires us to keep up to date.

These ideas are all highly relevant in pharmacy, in particular the requirements for both pharmacists and registered pharmacy technicians. In the next section we will look at six key domains that underpin the whole concept of professionalism. As you read through, you may wish to reflect on each of these and how they apply to you in your daily practice. It will be of help to reflect on situations where you have demonstrated or found challenges demonstrating these attributes.

Six key domains

To understand the full picture, it is useful to look at a number of domains, which together comprise all the aspects of professionalism that we and our patients rightly expect to see in health professionals.

These six key domains are:

1. Competence
2. Managing personal relationships
3. Maintaining professional boundaries
4. Delivering consistency and reliability of practice
5. Reflection and learning
6. Commitment to care.

Competence

Competence encompasses your knowledge, skills and ethics, and their appropriate application to your everyday practice.

At first glance, this looks relatively easy to understand, but it is anything but, primarily because pharmacists do quite different things. You can ask what a competent pharmacist does, but the answer will depend on the specifics, scope and sector of his or her practice, with each pharmacist working within the limits of their own competencies.

To put it another way, each professional’s competence must be assessed against his or her own scope of practice. This concept has been the subject of much debate within the profession already, and particularly in relation to how continuing fitness to practice might be assessed in the future.