Professional responsibility

Professional responsibility is a set of duties within the concept of professional ethics for those who exercise a unique set of knowledge and skill as professionals. Professional responsibility applies to those professionals making judgments, applying their unique skills, and reaching informed decisions for, or on behalf, of others, as professionals. Professionals must be seen to exercise due care and responsibility in their areas of specialisation – known as professions. What makes professionals unique, is that the general public would not ordinarily be expected know in detail the skills and knowledge of a professions independently. In a modern context, professional responsibility encompasses an array of the personal, corporate, and humanitarian standards of behaviour, as expected by clients, fellow professionals, and professional bodies. Professional responsibility historically applied to secularly taught professions including medicine, law, and divinity – or religion. The origins of this phrase date back to 1695, with the aforementioned split of the concept into three areas. The term continued to evolve alongside generally accepted responsibilities for professionals to become all-encompassing as it accommodated new emerging professions in modern societies. In the earlier history of the phrase ‘professional responsibility’, Thomas Percival (1740-1804) published one of the most notable professional codes for medical ethics, specifically for practising physicians in the United States governing their professional responsibilities as practitioners. Percival was also accomplished in founding one of the first known professional responsibility codes to be adopted by a professional body: The American Medical Association (AMA). More recently, modern professionals and their networks continue to adopt the various codes of professional responsibility to suit their evolving modern professions. Research has shown that through implementation of common behavioural standards, the likelihood of interpersonal conflict decreases where honour and respect is encouraged.