Assessing Professionalism in Medicine – A Scoping Review of Assessment Tools from 1990 to 2018

Medical professionalism enhances doctor-patient relationships and advances patient-centric care. However, despite its pivotal role, the concept of medical professionalism remains diversely understood, taught and thus poorly assessed with Singapore lacking a linguistically sensitive, context specific and culturally appropriate assessment tool. Arksey and O’Malley’s approach was used to identify appropriate publications featured in four databases published between 1 January 1990 and 31 December 2018. 3799 abstracts were identified, 138 full-text articles reviewed and 74 studies included. Prevailing assessments of professionalism in medicine must contend with differences in setting, context and levels of professional development as these explicate variances found in existing assessment criteria and approaches. However, acknowledging the significance of context-specific competency-based stages in medical professionalism will allow the forwarding of guiding principles to aid the design of a culturally-sensitive and practical approach to assessing professionalism.