Cultivating Health Professions Learners’ Moral Compass & Resilience Within Professional Identity Formation

Within increasing complexities in medicine including technologic advances, economic pressures, and competing demands, challenges and what can be perceived as burden have risen for healthcare practitioners and trainees. Under these conditions, moral distress and values conflicts are common. Thus, cultivating both moral awareness and responsibility within reflective professional identity formation (PIF) and situational judgment is crucial within health professions education to secure patients´ and practitioners´ dignity. Given dehumanization in medicine (so-called “epidemic”) as an ever-present threat to medicine’s social goals, the time is now for sharpening academia’s role in contributing both to ethically safe healthcare practices and the psychological wellbeing of professionals - How best to foster trainees,’ faculty’s, and practitioners’ moral development and equip them with a moral compass? How support developing humanistic values INSIDE of each individual as foundational and complementing technical competencies?