Accessibility in health professions education: The Flexner Report and barriers to diversity in American physical therapy.

Health professionals do not reflect the broader racial/ethnic diversity of the United States. Historical barriers to accessing health professions education have played a major role in initiating and perpetuating these disparities. Sociologists of professions have highlighted the role of educational reform in professions' efforts to enhance their status, but have overlooked the central role of government bodies in facilitating or impeding these strategies. The Flexner Report (1910) enhanced the status of medicine, but only after state medical boards adopted its recommendations, leading to the closure of half of the nation's medical schools and limiting opportunities for marginalized populations to enter the medical profession. Physical therapy leaders have espoused Flexner's precepts in seeking to advance their field's professionalization. In doing so, they consistently overlooked the more insidious impacts of Flexnerian approaches on student and practitioner diversity. This article examines how physical therapy's Flexnerian ambitions disrupted its parallel efforts to increase the field's racial/ethnic diversity. I argue that physical therapy leaders' focus on enhancing their profession's status and indifference toward facilitating educational access and mobility played a significant role in the field's racial/ethnic homogeneity. To increase practitioner diversity in the future, especially following the 2023 US Supreme Court decision (600 U.S. 181) restricting race conscious affirmative action, health professions must do more to address barriers to student access. This will involve moving away from the Flexnerian model and pursuing approaches that have helped more diverse and inclusive health professions, like nursing, to achieve greater educational opportunity and mobility.

Power Dynamics Among Health Professionals in Nigeria: A Case Study of the Global Fund Policy Process.

BACKGROUND: Health workers are central to health policy-making. Given health systems' complex, dynamic and political nature, various forms of 'hidden power' are at play as health workers navigate health systems. This study aims to explore the dynamics of power and its sources, and how this shapes policy-making and implementation within the Nigerian health systems context. METHODS: The case study was the Global Fund grant in Nigeria, and results are based on an in-depth qualitative study involving 34 semi-structured key informant interviews (KIIs), board-meeting observations, and documentary analysis conducted in 2014 and 2016. Participants held mid to senior-level positions (eg, Director, Programme Manager) within organisations involved with Global Fund activities, particularly proposal development and implementation. Data were analysed using thematic analysis in order to gain insight into the power dynamics of health professionals in policy processes. RESULTS: Medical professionals maintained dominance and professional monopoly, thereby controlling policy spaces. The structural and productive power of the biomedical discourse in policy-making encourages global actors and the local government's preference for rapid biomedical models that focus on medications, test kits, and the supply of health services, while neglecting aspects that would help us better understand the poor uptake of these services by those in need. The voices of the repressed groups (eg, non-clinical experts, patients and community based organisations) that better understand barriers to uptake of services are relegated. CONCLUSION: Professional monopoly theories help illustrate how medical professionals occupy and maintain an elite position in the health system of Nigeria. Structural and agential factors specific to the contexts are key in maintaining this professional monopoly while limiting the opportunities for other health occupations' rise up the social status ladder.

As práticas corporais na legislação imperial e a construção de uma sociologia da profissão para a educação física / Bodily practices in imperial legislation and constructing a professional sociology for physical education

Resumo O artigo aborda os ofícios ligados à educação física, perante leis e decretos oficiais do período imperial (1822-1889), tendo em vista traçar uma trajetória dos primeiros passos articulados pelos profissionais nos contextos civil e militar da sociedade brasileira antes de eles serem reconhecidos como membros de uma categoria profissional. Optou-se por um estudo documental de leis e decretos imperiais que mencionam os ofícios vinculados às práticas corporais. Nesse contexto foi identificado que, ao contrário dos trabalhos intelectuais, a baixa atratividade dos trabalhos práticos dificultava a dedicação exclusiva, assim como a estabilidade no exercício do trabalho. Esses elementos eram obstáculos para reivindicações mais organizadas da educação física, necessárias para sua profissionalização.

Abstract This documentary study examines official texts related to physical education in legislation and decrees from Brazil's imperial period (1822-1889) to trace the initial steps of professionals in this area within the civil and military context of Brazilian society, before they were recognized as a professional category. We found that unlike intellectual efforts, practical work was less attractive, which made it difficult for these professionals to work exclusively and maintain stability in this area. These elements were obstacles to more organized demands from physical education that were required for professionalization.

Understanding professional stakeholders' active resistance to guideline implementation: The case of Canadian breast screening guidelines.

Health guidelines aim to improve patient outcomes through the promotion of evidence-based practice. Yet, when a guideline's recommendations significantly differ from, or threaten the interests, values and preferred practices of end-users, organised and often very public resistance to guideline implementation may result. To explore this phenomenon, we theorise a case study consisting of the public discourse following the update to a primary care breast screening guideline in Canada in 2018. Informed by sociological perspectives on the professions and evidence-based medicine, this paper aims to explore: [1] why professional stakeholders form active resistances to the implementation of some clinical guidelines; and, [2] how professional values, perspectives, interests and/or experiences influence the stakeholders' stance. Current understandings have taken a reductive approach in conceptualising the exclusion of experts and their resistance as "conflict of interest." Rather, we suggest that resistance is the product of multiple areas of contention, stemming from tensions related to clinical and professional autonomy, medical jurisdiction, and the role of medical elites. We highlight considerations for future guideline development and implementation process changes to mitigate and resolve issues related to active resistance. These considerations include understanding resistance as a political strategy, increasing transparency of public input and coalition building as a part of the public response to active resistance.

Disturbing the Doxa of Patient Safety Comment on "False Dawns and New Horizons in Patient Safety Research and Practice".

In a recent edition of this journal, Mannion and Braithwaite provide a succinct analysis of the emergence, and ultimately limited impact, of what they term the current 'Safety I' movement in healthcare. They describe the arc of this field from denial, through engagement via mechanisms and approaches imported from other industries, to the current situation where, despite 'best efforts,' error rates remain stubbornly recalcitrant. In examining the failure of system-wide efforts to produce sustained reductions in errors and adverse events, that article exposes the doxa, or what Bourdieu calls 'the taken for granted' which is central to this latest wave of patient safety movement. In this commentary, I would like to take focus on two key elements of Mannion and Braithwaite's argument: that harm is caused by misguided but otherwise well-intentioned actions and the 'embracing' of patient safety. I then conclude by briefly considering the implications of these for Safety II, particularly as envisaged by the authors as an evolutionary, and therefore linear progression, from Safety I.

Beyond integrated care.

Integrated care tops the health care agenda. But more integration alone will not remedy the crisis in health care, and there is a danger in the increasingly prevalent conceptualization of care integration as a goal in itself rather than as an instrument for improving performance. Operating integrated care systems, staffed by an overly specialized medical workforce, is unsustainable in terms of human and financial resources and is likely to produce little benefit for patients with multi-morbidity. An alternative approach involves health care leaders going beyond integrated care and nurturing transformative change from within the medical workforce instead. To be fit for purpose, the doctors must be encouraged and facilitated to customize their expertise to current and expected future burdens of disease. This would lead to more adaptive doctors who could actively support people in healing and managing their own health. Integrated care should be conceptualized as one possible lever for transformative change rather than its endpoint.

The development of the nursing profession in a globalised context: A qualitative case study in Kerala, India.

In the paper, we are looking at the relationship between globalisation and the professional project, using nursing in Kerala as an exemplar. Our focus is on the intersection of the professional project, gender and globalisation processes. Included in our analysis are the ways in which gender affects the professional project in the global south, and the development of a professional project which it is closely tied to global markets and global migration, revealing the political-economic, historical, and cultural factors that influence the shape and consequences of nurse migration. The phenomenon that enabled our analysis, by showing these forces at work in a particular time and place, was an outbreak of strikes by nurses working in private hospitals in Kerala in 2011-2012.

Professionalism Redundant, Reshaped, or Reinvigorated? Realizing the "Third Logic" in Contemporary Health Care.

Recent decades have seen the influence of the professions decline. Lately, commentators have suggested a revived role for a "new" professionalism in ensuring and enhancing high-quality health care in systems dominated by market and managerial logics. The form this new professionalism might take, however, remains obscure. This article uses data from an ethnographic study of three English health care improvement projects to analyze the place, potential, and limitations of professionalism as a means of engaging clinicians in efforts to improve service quality. We found that appeals to notions of professionalism had strong support among practitioners, but converting enthusiasm for the principle of professionalism into motivation to change practice was not straightforward. Some tactics used in pursuit of this deviated sharply from traditional models of collegial social control. In systems characterized by fissures between professional groups and powerful market and managerial influences, we suggest that professionalism must interact creatively but carefully with other logics.

An open-system approach to medical professionalism: a controversy within the sociology of professions / O profissionalismo médico visto como um sistema aberto: uma controvérsia na sociologia das profissões / Profesionalismo médico visto como un sistema abierto: una controversia en la sociología de las profesiones

This article focuses on a specific debate within theories of professions. Despite different trends, there has been difficulty in theorizing some dimensions of the dominant perspectives because of predominant institutional attention. The aim here was to reinforce the debate with complementary conceptualization of professionalism and, consequently, to foster new understandings of professional relationships. The argument lies in shifting the analytical level from the professions to professionals, as a basic step in conceptualizing individual action within professional contexts. This concern becomes increasingly important as the professional discretion structurally held by individuals becomes greater, since the ability to choose leads more explicitly to internal differentiation of professions. Systemic influence is felt given that social structures are intrinsically involved in actions, which represent exteriorizations of individually internalized processes. Consequently, it becomes necessary to consider the reasons for behaviors and the meanings individually conferred on professional dimensions.

Este artigo debruça-se, num debate específico, nas teorias das profissões. O objetivo é reforçar o debate numa conceptualização complementar do profissionalismo, abrindo novos entendimentos sobre as relações profissionais. O argumento reside na mudança do nível analítico das profissões para os profissionais, como passo elementar para conceptualizar a acção individual em contexto profissional. Esta preocupação é tanto mais importante como maior for a discricionariedade profissional estruturalmente detida pelos indivíduos, dado que a capacidade para escolher conduz, de uma forma mais explícita, à diferenciação interna das profissões. A influência sistêmica faz-se sentir considerando que as estruturas sociais estão intrinsecamente envolvidas nas ações, as quais representam exteriorizações de processos individualmente internalizados. Consequentemente, torna-se necessário considerar as razões para os comportamentos e os sentidos individualmente conferidos às dimensões profissionais.

Este artículo se centra en un debate sobre las teorías de las profesiones. Se intenta fortalecer el debate en una conceptuación del profesionalismo y de las relaciones profesionales. El argumento radica en cambiar el nivel de análisis de las profesiones para los profisionales, como paso elemental para conceptuar la acción individual en contexto profesional. Esta preocupación es tanto más importante cuanto mayor es la discreción profesional estructuralmente consentida, ya que la capacidad de elegir conduce explícitamente a la diferenciación interna de las profesiones. La influencia sistémica se hace notar teniendo en cuenta que las estructuras sociales están intrínsecamente comprendidas en las acciones, y estas son exteorizaciones de procesos individualmente interiorizados. Se hace necesario considerar las razones de los comportamientos y los significados individualmente dados a las dimensiones profesionales.

As ocupações supostamente subalternas: o exemplo da enfermagem brasileira / The supposedly subaltern professions: the example of Brazilian nursing

Este é um estudo sobre a história da formação de Educadoras Sanitárias e Enfermeiras de Saúde Pública na primeira metade do século 20, com destaque para acontecimentos em São Paulo e no Rio de Janeiro. A sociologia histórica proporciona um instrumental teórico-metodológico fundamental para análise e interpretação das relações entre instituições, poder e identidades profissionais e, nesse sentido, permite o estudo do processo de demarcação de um território de decisões e de atuação feminina que não fosse marcado pela subalternidade à profissão médica. O presente estudo se apóia na literatura histórico-sociológica que discute o movimento de configuração do campo da saúde pública iniciado nos anos de 1920 e estreitamente ligado aos debates sobre a nacionalidade e a constituição de identidades profissionais no campo do Cuidar. A década de 1920 instaurou novas práticas e concepções na relação entre Estado e sociedade, acentuando-se a especialização em saúde pública ou higiene. A formação de novas categorias seguiu um modelo de profissionalização baseado na "feminização" da atenção ao paciente e às famílias. O texto discute a formação das profissionais e a organização do campo do trabalho. Conclui-se que a ênfase nas conquistas do poder médico pela literatura tem relegado, a segundo plano, o surgimento do novo campo profissional para jovens mulheres das classes médias e de alguns segmentos urbanos das camadas populares, que passaram a atuar como visitadoras da Educação Sanitária e da Enfermagem de Saúde Pública, bem como nos centros e postos de saúde que se difundiram por várias regiões do país.