The professional bodies have a duty to ensure that practitioners achieve and maintain the highest ethical standards and professional competence, and to make the right decisions about patient care. To do this, students must be able to show integrity, compassion, sensitivity, honesty, respect and empathy in day-to-day practice and maintain appropriate professional relationships with patients. They must also exercise good judgement and avoid conflicts of interest.

Wow - quite a responsibility and difficult to learn in laboratories and lecture halls. It is not even easy to learn this on placement and so we have collected some resources to help with this process. There are excerpts from interviews with someone who has gone through the cancer treatment journey and the strong message from her is to remember that you are treating a person as well as a disease.

We have developed a short video highlighting the key points when dealing with people from different cultures. This helps you understand about cultural awareness and the cultural distance that exists between professionals and patients as well as between people of different cultures and upbringings. Health systems have a responsibility to offer compassionate care to those people from ‘hard to reach groups’ and treat all patients with care and respect. You may also be interested in looking at a video of a seminar on refugees held last summer 2015 at UCC.