Healthcare professionals strive to embody values, behaviours and relationships which enable their patients to trust them in providing high quality care. This is not only an enormous privilege, but also a great responsibility.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has been the greatest health, economic and societal catastrophe of our age. The human cost is truly staggering as WHO has reported over 175 million confirmed positive cases and over 3.7 million deaths worldwide. Amongst them, many frontline health and social care professionals have lost their lives in the line of duty. Medical professionalism has been tested to its limits and beyond. During the combat with the unexpected pandemic, health and social care professionals have shown compassion, duty, altruism and heroism across the globe. This has challenged our personal and professional integrities, and exposed a plethora of inequalities in healthcare systems and society, and placed enormous strain on an already overburdened, understaffed and under-resourced healthcare systems worldwide.
In recognition, this special collection will document and celebrate the heroic response of our health and social care professionals as educators, healers, scientists, and leaders. This special collection invites scholarly articles about professionalism in the pandemic, and includes but is not limited to, the following:
- Medical professionalism
- Medical ethics
- The primacy of patient welfare and best-interests
- Patient autonomy and consent
- Social justice and the use of resources
- Integrity, compassion, altruism and duty
- Professional competence and excellence
- Working in partnership
- Resilience, self-care and burnout
- Unprofessional behaviour and remediation
- Moral reasoning and distress
- Bioethics
- Social accountability
With regards to article types, we will consider the following:
- Research article
- Database article
- Software article
- Debate
- Case report
- Study protocol
- Review
Please note, Correspondence and Commentary articles will be considered, but only at the discretion of the journal Editor and Guest Editors.
The BMC Medical Ethics submission guidelines can be found here, and the BMC Editorial Policies can be found here.
Please do not hesitate to contact the journal Editor for further information or with any questions regarding the Collection.