Redefining Professional Skills in Health Sciences

Professionalism breaches are derailing student clinical placements

With an increasing number of complaints from clinical educators, professionalism breaches — including inappropriate social media use, poor communication, and unprofessional conduct in healthcare settings — have led to placement cancellations and failures in student progression.

This project set out to identify the root causes of these concerns and develop ways to standardise and embed professionalism training across multiple health science disciplines.

Project Goals

Doing the Research

To design an impact-driven professionalism learning framework, we conducted extensive research combining qualitative and quantitative methods — capturing insights from students, educators, and faculty members. Our goal was to identify the barriers preventing students from developing professionalism skills and generate solutions that address real-world challenges.

To really understand why professionalism has become such a large concern, we needed to consult both students and their teachers — and what we found was a heavily disorganised scene.

Snippets of The Survey Data

Survey participants demographics overview

What did we find?

Currently, professionalism education is inconsistent across courses — often left to the discretion of individual educators rather than being systematically integrated. Students also have varying definitions and understandings of “professionalism”.

Making Sense of All Our Data

We used thematic analysis to code coordinator interviews, identifying sub-themes and larger overarching themes. For student interviews, we used an affinity diagram with a bottom-up approach — grouping individual quotations into larger categories by identifying common patterns.

Co-designing with our users

As one of two design students on the team, I was responsible for guiding the broader team through ideation. We ran two co-design workshops — ensuring that students and staff without a design background could participate effectively.

We knew we needed the ideas to come from the people who would actually use these tools — not just from us.

Workshop 1 — Brainstorming & Refinement

Our first ideation workshop focused on brainstorming and refining interactive learning activities for professionalism training in HSBH1003 tutorials.

Reverse Thinking

Explored how professionalism training might fail, then reversed those failures into positive design strategies.

Crazy 8's

Participants sketched eight ideas in eight minutes, then shared their favourites in a group discussion.

Storyboarding

After hearing all ideas, participants chose one concept to develop in detail through narrative storyboarding.

Workshop 2 — Expanding Ideas with 15 Participants

A second co-design workshop with 15 students and staff from a broad range of health science degrees explored further concepts.

Mindmapping

Mapped out professionalism pain points, opportunity areas, and potential delivery modes.

Forced Association

Branched out of the mindmap to rapidly generate out-of-the-box solutions.

Brainwriting

Participants built upon each other's ideas over multiple rounds, refining concepts collectively.

How did we decide?

After each workshop, the team evaluated potential solutions using a 12-point Pugh matrix — scoring ideas against criteria drawn directly from our research insights and assessing feasibility for implementation. This kept our creative energy focused on what was actually achievable.

Our final solutions

After identifying key gaps in professionalism education, we developed a suite of solutions aimed at making professionalism training engaging, accessible, and applicable to all students — regardless of their schedule, preferred learning mode, or in-class confidence.

Semester 2 — AI Professionalism Chatbots

To engage students who are less likely to participate in-class, we co-designed tools enabling self-guided, asynchronous, and multi-modal learning. Leveraging Cogniti — a university-integrated generative AI platform — we built 4 specialised professionalism chatbots trained on reliable University resources to reduce biases.

Professionalism Cover Letter Writing Chatbot

Guides students in crafting structured, professional, and tailored cover letters, offering feedback on content, tone, and alignment with job descriptions.

AI Chatbot Interview Simulator

Simulates real-world job interviews for healthcare roles, asking role-specific questions and providing personalised feedback to improve students' confidence and responses.

Professionalism Skills Feedback Chatbot

A scenario-based role play chatbot that allows students to practice professionalism-related conversations, receiving instant feedback on tone, communication, and ethical considerations.

Professionalism FAQs Chatbot

Answering students' common professionalism-related questions, including expected workplace behavior, ethical obligations, and legal compliance standards.

The Professionalism Skills Matrix

To support educators, updated Learning Outcomes and a Professionalism Matrix provide a structured framework defining competencies across soft, technical, and ethical skills — serving as:

A unified definition of professionalism shared across students and educators, reducing inconsistency between units.

A benchmarking tool for tracking professionalism growth throughout the degree.

A self-assessment resource for students to identify strengths and areas for improvement at each stage of their studies.

Putting our assumptions to the test

In theory our solutions sounded promising, but before handing them off to the staff members, we needed to put our assumptions to the test.

Designing for context-specific solutions

The Professionalism Project successfully introduced scalable, interactive learning tools to enhance professionalism education. Our two-hour handover workshop to staff received overwhelmingly positive feedback, with many educators booking consultations to explore integration into their courses.

This project has laid the foundation for sustained curriculum integration — equipping both educators and students with practical, real-world professionalism training that will evolve with future cohorts.

P.S We won an award!

Reflections

The Professionalism Project was an exercise in adaptability, leadership, and collaboration — reinforcing the reality that designing impactful solutions is rarely a linear process. Unlike structured coursework, this project taught me that sometimes supervisors don't have all the answers, and progress depends on taking initiative.

One of the biggest challenges was managing scope within budget constraints, requiring strategic prioritisation of deliverables. While co-design sessions generated ambitious ideas, not all were feasible. The challenge was to harness creative energy while keeping solutions practical — a delicate balance between innovation and real-world constraints.

~ Serena