Developing 'the good healthcare practitioner': clues from a study in medical education

This article explores perspectives on the idea of 'the good healthcare practitioner', through active consideration of virtue theory and how virtue could be embedded and developed in the lives of healthcare practitioners. It draws particularly on exploratory work with a small number of medical students and general practitioners, in which these participants were asked to reflect on what, for them, constituted 'the good doctor'. Three key themes emerged from this empirical work: the idea of medicine as a 'lived experience' and the potential of this to contribute to developing the lives of 'good doctors'; the importance of relationships with patients in understanding who is a 'good doctor'; and the essential need to attempt the marrying of technical medical knowledge with humanistic skills and intuitive sympathy in 'good medical lives'. The article reflects on the implications of these themes for medical education and training in particular, and more generally for the wider healthcare field. Some methodological difficulties in the relationship between theoretical conceptions and these empirical investigations are discussed, as are those connected to using the experience of medicine as an exemplar for how the 'good lives' of healthcare practitioners, in general, might be developed