Mission

Optimizing patient care through professionalism education, scholarship, policy, and practice in all health-related fields.

Objectives

The Academy's first major objective is to promote collaborative, multidisciplinary dialogue and research among professionalism educators. Members of the Academy are expected to engage in, individually or collectively, the following activities:

• Explore intellectual questions pertaining to professionalism in health care (such as the meaning of "professionalism" and how it should inform both curricula and assessment);
  
• Collect, catalogue, and distribute the broad spectrum of model curricula and other teaching materials in medical ethics and humanities toward professionalism with our strategic partner, MedEdPORTAL (MedEdPORTAL.org);
• Develop educational syllabi, evaluation and assessment tools, methods, and strategies; and,
• Assemble during annual and other APHC-sponsored meetings to promote collaboration, dialogue and research.

The Academy's second major objective is for APHC members and external stakeholders to improve educational efforts in medical school, residency, and faculty development programs to achieve the goal of promoting professionalism.

• Be a sounding board for ideas and a stimulus not to lose sight of the centrality of the teaching of medical ethics and humanities toward professionalism;
• Engage accreditation bodies (e.g. Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the Liaison Committee for Medical Education (LCME), the Accreditation Council of Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), and the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)) to develop the best possible educational assessment methods and instruments;
• Address, among other issues, desired professional outcomes, facilitation of these outcomes, and assessment, broadly understood, of educational strategies employed; and
• Formulate and implement plans to address the needs of educators in ethics and humanities, social and behavioral sciences, law, public policy, and clinical medicine toward the improvement of professionalism in health care.

Thank you to the Patrick and Edna Romanell Fund

The Academy for Professionalism in Health Care (APHC) is grateful to the Patrick and Edna Romanell Fund for Bioethics Pedagogy and the Center for Clinical Ethics at the University at Buffalo, for its extensive support for our developing organization over the years. This support included subvening the PRIME Project that investigated the role of professionalism in medical ethics pedagogy, the three subsequent APHC national conferences that grew out of that project, and now the Academy itself which brought much of the preceding to fruition. Currently this support continues in the form of the Romanell Fellowships at APHC meetings, as well as the underwriting for plenary speakers and other meeting expenses in holding the APHC annual meetings. We are profoundly indebted to their generous support.