Professional Identity in the Caring Professions: Meaning, Measurement and Mastery

Professional identity is a central topic in all courses of professional training and educators must decide what kind of identity they hope their students will develop, as well as think about how they can recruit for, facilitate and assess this development.

This unique book explores professional identity in a group of caring professions, looking at definition, assessment, and teaching and learning. Professional Identity in the Caring Professions includes overviews of professional identity in nursing, medicine, social work, teaching, and lecturing, along with a further chapter on identity in emergent professions in healthcare. Additional chapters look at innovative approaches to selection, competency development, professional values, leadership potential and reflection as a key element in professional and interprofessional identity. The book ends with guidance for curriculum development in professional education and training, and the assessment of professional identity.

This international collection is essential reading for those who plan, deliver and evaluate programs of professional training, as well as scholars and advanced students researching identity in the caring professions, including medicine, nursing, allied health, social work and teaching.

Roger Ellis 0000-0003-4073-1150 is Emeritus Professor at the University of Ulster and the University of Chester, UK. He edited Professional Competence and Quality Assurance in the Caring Professions in 1988 of which this book is in many ways the successor. Both represent his long-standing interest in professional identity where he has published widely. His academic managerial career has been mainly in the education of caring professions pre and post registration, for which work he received the Order of the British Empire. He has taught and managed in five universities and enjoyed a synergy between his teaching, leadership and research in promoting student learning, professional identity development and research and evaluation capability. He is Director of the Social and Health Evaluation Unit International which has completed a number of programme evaluations in social and health care. His main current research interests include identity in the caring professions; programme evaluation, personal development and learning disability, and values-based recruitment.

Elaine Hogard is the Director of Assessment and Program Evaluation and Professor of Program Evaluation at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. She has served for the past 10 years on the Northern Ontario School of Medicine’s curriculum committee that focuses upon professionalism and medical ethics. She has a longstanding interest in professional identity and its evaluation and measurement and has numerous publications in the field. One of her current research areas includes value-based recruitment for medical education and she is developing a unique psychometric instrument for this purpose: Medi-Match. Her abiding interest in professionalism and identity goes back to original graduate work. It was particularly stimulated by her first large-scale program evaluation which was of an emergent hybrid professional identity. This interest in professionalism and identity led to her working primarily in professional faculties and schools throughout her academic career across Canada, the US, the UK and Ireland. She has supervised a number of PhD scholars who were concerned with professional identity.