Revised Guidelines for Professionalism, Licensure and Personal Conduct

In May 2021, we announced a revision of ABFM’s Guidelines for Professionalism, Licensure and Personal Conduct. The result of more than a year of careful study and deliberations, these revisions serve to improve the clarity of the process by which board-certified physicians are evaluated for medical professionalism and provide greater flexibility to the Professionalism Committee of the ABFM Board of Directors that reviews these individual cases. Our editorial in the current issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, Revisiting Medical Professionalism and ABFM’s Guidelines for Professionalism, Licensure, and Personal Conduct in a New Era, provides a closer look at the revisions, which include more contemporary descriptions of medical professionalism, the social contract, and the conduct and behaviors that demonstrate professionalism.