Professional Identity Formation in Allied Health: A Systematic Review with Narrative Synthesis

Teach Learn Med. 2023 Dec 11:1-17. doi: 10.1080/10401334.2023.2290608. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTPhenomenon: Professional identity formation is a key component of health professional education. Changing expectations of healthcare requires more than competencies, but also an ingrained responsibility to patients, with our values and behaviors aligned with community expectations of patient-centered health professionals. Research into professional identity formation has focused on nursing and medical training, and, although allied health professionals make up one third of the workforce, research is uneven across these disciplines. Health professions educators from these under-researched disciplines have less guidance for how to support students' professional identity, meaning students may graduate with less mature professional identities. This systematic literature review synthesizes the research on professional identity formation across nine similar allied health disciplines. The purpose is to guide health professions educators in the formation of professional identity in allied health students. Approach: We carried out a systematic literature review, registered on Prospero, following the PRIMSA framework, to find, appraise, and synthesize research on professional identity for nine allied health professions. We synthesized extracted data using a narrative synthesis with convergent qualitative meta-integration of qualitative and quantitative data. Results: Our database search...

Source: Teaching and Learning in Medicine - December 11, 2023 Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Abigail Lewis Janica Jamieson Cindy Ann Smith Source Type: research