Exploring the climates of undergraduate professionalism in a Saudi and a UK medical school

Abstract

Aim: To explore the usefulness of an online inventory for tracking medical students' understanding of the importance of lapses in academic integrity.

Method: Respondents were asked to recommend sanctions for lapses as a proxy of their understanding of the importance of the 34 types of poor professionalism.

Results: The data suggest that while there is congruence, there are also substantial differences between ratings of the importance of poor professionalism, particularly in relation to data integrity, between a cohort in Saudi Arabia and one in the UK.

Conclusion: This resource may be useful both for teaching and learning in individual schools, and particularly for the induction of doctors into organisational environments different from the one they were trained in.