2.1.3 Professional Behaviours for Medical Personnel

For any health care workers, professional responsibilities include both:

• Competence, and
• Lifelong learning

In other words, it is important to both attain the knowledge and clinical skills you need to do your job, and to maintain and add to this knowledge and skillset.

Furthermore, you have a set of obligations when relating to your clients, colleagues and others. The first of these is honesty. You must be honest with:

• Patients
• Coworkers
• Employers
• Health Team members

Second, you must always uphold confidentiality in several key ways:

• Understand and follow the provisions of the Personal Health Information Protection Act.
• Do not discuss patient information of any kind outside of the work unit.
• Do not discuss private information of coworkers.

Third, you must take care to maintain appropriate relationships with patients. Never have a relationship with a patient that exploits the patient or causes them to have an undue dependence on you outside of your assigned duties.

As a health care professional, you have an ethical responsibility to work towards improving the quality of care. You can do this by participating in quality-of-care development measures and programs.

Related to this duty is your commitment to scientific knowledge. You must uphold scientific based standards of care to ensure evidence-based care best practices.

Next, be sure to maintain trust by managing conflicts of interest effectively. Consider that in small communities and family situations, everyone knows or is related to each other. There can be interpersonal dynamics at play that can impact how you do your job if you are not careful.

Check your biases at the door. Eliminate biases based on:

• Gender
• Race
• Socioeconomic status
• Sexual orientation
• Religion/belief systems
• Physical appearance
• Mental coping capacity

Your bias will be felt by the client if you do not put it behind you.

Finally, there are many considerations related to communication that you will send and receive in the course of your job. Review these issues below:

• Email. Does your email address say what you want for professional purposes? Is it secured? Are you required by your employer to use a certain email address for work? You must not use your email to convey information about clients, work issues or your co-workers.
• Cell phones. Mobile telephones are not to be used during client care unless you are being contacted by your employer. You must not use your cell phone to convey information about clients, work issues or your co-workers (including photos).
• Social media. No client or employer content is ever to be posted on social media. Check your social media pages; is this the professional presence you want people to see?

You will investigate communication in a lot more detail in a moment.