Their position affords the medical community considerable societal influence and economic reward as well as entailing the obligation on doctors to behave and practice with diligence, expertise, and care. Identity was framed as an organizational management tool to “generate competitive advantage through their people by working toward organizational and individual identity congruence” (106). Both the tradition of the hard-working veterinarian and the dissonances between rhetoric and reality were vegas casino suggested as possibly being involved in the well-documented issues around wellness and mental health in the profession. The notoriously crowded curriculum can be overly dominated by clinical knowledge and technical skills, and outcomes-based curricula are awkward spaces for the inclusion of inherently developmental phenomena.

Content ID

Students struggled with an idealistic depiction of professionalism in the classroom and a different reality outside it. Medicine’s contemporary “professionalism movement” first called for a useful definition of terms, especially to distinguish professionalism from content areas such as jurisprudence, ethics, and communication (Hafferty and Levinson, 2008). Neubauer, AC, and Hofer, G. Self-estimates of abilities are a better reflection of individuals’ personality traits than their abilities and are also strong predictors of professional interests. Resilience in veterinary students and the predictive role of mindfulness and self-compassion.

Early reinforcement of professional identity

The perception of stigma is not necessarily irrational in an environment where the concept of “fitness to practice” may be interpreted or operationalised in overly rigid terms as complete freedom from impairment (42, 43). Rates of mental distress in practicing veterinarians have been reported as being significantly higher than in the general population. The closeness and love that people feel toward their pets supports a discourse that portrays companion animals as part of the family (21, 22). At the same time, urban populations are almost entirely unconnected with the livestock industries that produce their food, a phenomenon that has been described as “post-domestication” (20), meaning that the majority of the general population have little to no direct experience with, or understanding of, farming practices.

Unique word choices

In developed countries, an increasingly urbanized population with unprecedentedly high standards of living but experiencing disturbing levels of loneliness (19) has fuelled an increase in companion animal ownership. The human- animal bond is an ancient and established feature of human animal relations, but its characteristics change as societies change. Utilization by humans confers a value on animals, whether material, economic, cultural, or emotional, and notions of ownership or stewardship locate responsibility for husbandry tasks (14, 15). Being accepted as a profession carries significant benefits such as public status, economic reward, claims to self-determination and trustworthiness, which appears to be a designation to be pursued and guarded assiduously (4).

Educators must be on the alert for and proactively address contemporary issues that challenge or reshape our notions of professionalism (Table 25.1). Structurally, professionalism curricula usually balance formal and informal approaches so that delivery of a cognitive base and experiential and reflective work are included (Cruess and Cruess, 2009; Inui et al., 2009). If the content appears haphazard, it may feel like multiple, orphaned topics have been thrown together into a professionalism or “doctoring” course. Within this framework, professionalism is a curricular theme that appears in all courses or blocks, presented in a manner relevant to the setting. A commitment to the manner in which we meet professional obligations should be just as strong as our commitments to quality medical care and rigorous biomedical research. Further, contemporary professionalism education emphasizes self-awareness, self-management, and reflection, all skills that foster adaptability and ongoing personal growth.

Why Bother Teaching Professionalism?

The fall 2020 cohort was the one outliner with just under 30% of students recording one or the other of these terms. In a medical context, it seems intuitively reasonable, at least for clinically focused individuals, to desire to be described as “Caring” for others. For this study, we were not intending to determine if these students are, in fact, what they say they are or will be. These questions, however, do provide opportunities for further student discussion during future curricular activities. Trends in word choices for the prompt “How would you describe yourself?

The privilege and responsibility borne by the individual practitioner for patients is analogous between human and veterinary medical practitioners. The underpinning scientific knowledge of the structure and function of bodies; the techniques, medicines, equipment, and terminology of the clinic; and the discourse of health and illness present clear biomedical parallels between the veterinary and medical settings. Dialogue is also to be understood as a means for understanding the relational self so that identity allows for multiple sites of the self, a self that is grounded in social practices. Self-authoring is dialogic, embodied, and embedded in social practices, as the individual develops an internalized sense of the responses and social judgements of others. From a sociocultural, practice-based perspective, the mutual constitution of the individual and the social means that possibilities for agency are mediated by means of sociomaterial setups, through cultural norms, through individual dispositions, and through complex interrelationships of some or all of those elements (89). When veterinarians make decisions, act, and account for their actions to themselves and others in the course of their daily practice, they are engaging in veterinary practice.

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We highlight narrative and dialogue as key cultural tools through which veterinarians make meaning of their experiences, enable agency, and author themselves. Firstly, when a term like identity is used casually and repeatedly in everyday life, it can take on an all-encompassing character that paradoxically strips it of meaning. Reflecting the clinical disciplinary traditions, there is a resulting over-representation of individualistic, positivist perspectives and under-theorized research studies. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.

• Most common word choices for the prompt “How would you like your future veterinary colleagues to describe you?
• The unique and foremost responsibility of veterinary professionals to the welfare of the animal creates a complex professional web, including relationships among veterinarians, animal caretakers, and practice employers.
• In this paper we provide an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for veterinary practice and veterinary professional identity grounded in a practice theory perspective.
• The five most common word choices for the prompt “How would you like your future clients to describe you?
• Similarly, whether developing compassion is or should be an educational outcome or competency of the veterinary curriculum?
• Professional practitioners bring their own unique combination of experiences, dispositions, and capabilities, and they encounter practice situations that are novel and specific.

Proposed Definition of Veterinary Professionalism (Mossop,

Content organization requires a challenging balancing act to hit the mark for context and relevance at each point in the curriculum, avoiding redundancy to maintain student interest. Again, educators must be prepared to elicit observations and discussion from students, rather than simply relaying their own experience or perspective. Faculty and staff should be aware that students are continually watching for clues as to how to act. It is important to ensure that students reflect on action as well as the more spontaneous reflection in action (Schön, 1983), and this can be facilitated by the use of reflective diaries or portfolios, in which students describe their thoughts and actions and their impact on others.

We undertook the first task by highlighting just some of the complex and contested issues and problems facing the contemporary veterinary profession, including challenges of professional status and economics, changing human-animal relations, issues of wellness and feminisation of the profession. By contrast, there are a small number of studies conducted outside the professional practice literature in which veterinarians were selected for research focus by researchers in other scholarly traditions. The psychological framing of professional identity as described by Armitage-Chan is one valid way of framing this notoriously slippery concept.

Indeed, Mossop (2012) recognized the importance of context and the limitations of simply adapting a definition created for physicians to veterinary medicine. Birden makes similar conclusions about context, including geographical region, medical specialty, and personal interpretation. Hafferty distills five thematic conclusions, including three common threads – altruism, civic engagement, and self-reflection/mindfulness. It is a vocation in which knowledge of some department of science or learning or the practice of an art founded upon it is used in the service of others.

• The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.
• Most common word choices (ranked) for the prompt “How would you describe yourself?
• Particular practice architectures may be very stable and long-lasting, or they may be ephemeral and dependent on fast-changing contextual conditions.
• To demonstrate professionalism, veterinary surgeons should at all times consider their responsibilities to, and the expectations of, their clients, the animals under their care, society and the veterinary practice that provides their employment.
• We argued that there is a need for research that can bring individual veterinarians and contextual factors into one conceptual frame.
• These are core curriculum classes that are components of a series of courses primarily to develop the “non-technical” skills of veterinary students.

Cruess, RL, Cruess, SR, Boudreau, JD, Snell, L, and Steinert, Y. Reframing medical education to support professional identity formation. These questions may be answerable in the future through the analysis of our admission evaluations and other selection criteria for accepting students into the veterinary curriculum. Do students with certain future career tracks, for example, not view these descriptors as necessary professional “identities”?

The level of detail presented in this paper is certainly not required in every research report exploring veterinary practice. On the theoretical level, although the importance of conceptual frameworks has been highlighted in the context of veterinary social science and especially qualitative research (132), there is a paucity of examples grounded in the veterinary context that elaborate and articulate such a rigorous, interdisciplinary conceptual framework. On the practical level, the framework can be used and drawn upon flexibly for researchers, for practitioners and for the veterinary profession more broadly. The veterinary profession is grounded in a scientific worldview, which has served well for advances in clinical care. We argued that there is a need for research that can bring individual veterinarians and contextual factors into one conceptual frame. The intertwinement of the personal and the professional can be viewed uneasily in a profession for which objectivity, certainty, and competence are tightly held as hallmarks of professional position.

Education

Of course, the primary reason to embrace professionalism is to preserve the health of the profession. All of these are compelling reasons to include professionalism explicitly in the curricula for veterinarians in training. Reframing the positive reasons why professionalism is important, with extensive student input, may be more effective and collaborative in gaining buy-in. Unprofessional physician behavior has been linked to compromised treatment, poor patient outcomes, dysfunctional healthcare teams, and malpractice suits (Johnson, 2009; Bahaziq and Crosby, 2011).

The responsibility on the individual veterinarian to manage, understand, manage, and even overcome their context seems heavy indeed. Framing identity in dialogical terms allows for incoherence and instability to sit alongside unity and continuity (89, 96). A sociocultural perspective allows the location of identity in more than one space and asserts that it is necessary to reject neither traditional “essentialist” views of identity nor constructivist perspectives that locate an ever-changing identity in discourse communities.

Making meaning of professional practice experiences is highlighted as a crucial dimension of being a veterinarian, and the way in which professional identity is made visible and developed. Finally, a careful theoretical conception provides tools with which to rigorously and critically evaluate and explore claims or interventions that purport to impact on professional identity and its development within and beyond formal educational settings. There are multiple reasons to value a detailed articulation and a rich conceptualization of veterinary professional identity, and here we mention three. Despite the availability of theoretically informed literature in diverse relevant domains and disciplines including professional practice, workplace learning, and medical sociology and anthropology, commentary and research on veterinary practice issues and phenomena remains dominated by clinician-educators and clinician-policymakers. Professional, social, and cultural issues and phenomena of veterinary practice are now established areas of commentary and interest in research, education, professional publications and even in the mainstream media.

Figure 25.1 The elements that contribute to professional identity formation in veterinary students. A renewed call has urged medical educators to embrace the development of professionalism as the development of professional identity. Hopefully, the characteristics and outcome behaviors we instill in our students align with their future “identity” for our profession as these students enter the workforce as veterinary professionals. The hypothesis for comparison is that the most common student word choices would not change over the study time, even as new generations of students enter the veterinary curriculum. Emerging research on emotion and other deeply personal dimensions of medical student learning and professional identity development (114, 116, 129, 130) have advocated “acknowledging the full range of negative to positive emotions and making them an integral and essential part of identity development” (131). At an individual level, professional identity research has focused on character in individual doctors, on models of practice and their implications for identity, and on relationships between professionalism and professional identity.

The presence and extent of a gender pay gap in the veterinary profession has been repeatedly demonstrated, although its existence remains contested (51, 56, 70–73). As an example, the commonly espoused strengths of female veterinarians in relational and caring qualities can be positioned as being inimical to qualities required for economic success and career enhancement (65). The ongoing position of women in the veterinary profession has recently been characterized as a post-feminist paradox, an experience of career limitation at odds with a rhetoric of unconstrained opportunity (58).