Toward responsive attunement as health professionals
Gloria Dall’Alba
Abstract
Despite considerable research into educating health professionals, debate continues about what is to be learned in becoming professionals. Some studies highlight what individuals are to acquire in preparation for health professional practice. Others attend to relations among people in healthcare and/or their social, material situations, including forming professional or interprofessional identity. Although these various studies have progressed the debate, they have not yet provided an integrated conceptual framework on preparing health professionals for the challenges of practice. Toward promoting such a framework, this article introduces a notion of responsive attunement for educating health professionals. A key concern in responsive attunement is developing an enhanced capacity to tune in to situations encountered, in order to respond on the basis of this attunement. This notion has three integrative features: (1) it has relevance for practice within and across health professions; (2) it couples what students know and can do (an epistemological dimension) with how they are learning to be (an ontological dimension); and (3) it is applicable at individual and collective levels. Promoting an enhanced capacity to respond with attunement – both individually and collectively – can contribute to preparing health professionals for the challenges of practice in our dynamic, complex world.