Sylvia R Cruess

Sylvia R. Cruess, M.D., is an endocrinologist at McGill University and former Medical Director of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montréal. Twenty years ago, following distinguished careers in these respective fields, Sylvia Cruess and her husband, Dr Richard Cruess, began working together on issues related to professionalism and medicine. They have developed a definition of profession for medical educators, have developed and published methods of teaching professionalism, and have created...See more

Sylvia R. Cruess, M.D., is an endocrinologist at McGill University and former Medical Director of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montréal. Twenty years ago, following distinguished careers in these respective fields, Sylvia Cruess and her husband, Dr Richard Cruess, began working together on issues related to professionalism and medicine. They have developed a definition of profession for medical educators, have developed and published methods of teaching professionalism, and have created methods of assessing professionalism in students, residents, and faculty members. In all of their work, they have emphasized the importance of medicine's social contract with society. Recently they, along with others, have come to believe that the teaching of professionalism should not be regarded as an educational goal in itself. Rather, teaching professionalism is a means to an end, with the end being to ensure that all individuals entering the practice of medicine have acquired a professional identity so that they come to think act, and feel like physicians. Their recent work has focused on the nature of a medical professional identity and how best to support learners as they acquire this identity. This work has been done in collaboration with Yvonne Steinert. See less