The Question of Professionalization: A Narrative

For quite some time now, there have been discussions and debates in North America in the field of ethics concerning professionalization. From a talk given to graduate and undergraduate university students, the author tells the personal journey of an ethicist in the province of Quebec, Canada, and offers a narrative to illustrate some of the issues she faced since starting her work in the field of ethics at the end of the 1990s. Instead of taking the usual “for” and “against” positions, the author addresses the issue of professionalization of healthcare ethics from her own point of view. Referring to her experience with ethics committees and research ethics boards and to the works of George A. Legault in Crise d’identité professionnelle et Professionnalisme (Presses de l’Université du Québec, Sainte-Foy, 2003), she pleads for the development of practice standards and the creation of a deliberative process (see Kirby and Simpson in this issue of HEC Forum 2012), a dialogical space for assuring professionalism in healthcare ethics interventions, not solely the act of becoming a profession.