Students, faculty, staff demonstrate commitment with pledge

By Judie L. Kinonen

In a display of passionate commitment to the ideals of professionalism, UTMB students from all four schools hosted the campus community in Student Honor Pledge Day, Jan. 22 in Moody Medical Plaza.

Here, faculty, staff and students alike gathered to recite a pledge, in response to the students’ comprehensive, strategic campaign to unify the campus under one statement about integrity, compassion and respect—the principles behind professionalism.

UTMB President John D. Stobo; Dr. Guilio Taglialatela, chair of the Faculty Senate; and Eddie Salazar, chair of Student Government, were on hand to endorse the pledge, which was presented to campus by an Honor Pledge Committee.The committee, with two student representatives from each school and the associate dean of students from each school, has worked since last summer to painstakingly compose this pledge and then organize the special pronouncement, with hope that every member of the UTMB community will be able to apply the pledge to their lives.

Dr. Rebecca Saavedra, associate vice president for Student Services, chaired the committee, and she attests to the students’ determination to find words that would hold meaning for all UTMB students, faculty and staff, whether their focus was research or patient care.

“We had in mind from the start that the individual schools and departments already have codes of conduct or a list of principles, each symbolic to that specific field,” Saavedra said. “We didn’t want to edit or change those, or ask any of the schools to do away with anything they’d already developed. Rather, we wanted a capstone for the whole campus, a unifying statement.”

They also wanted something concise and memorable, said Kim Hennan, a second-year medical student who served on the committee. The group studied the definitions of each important word in the pledge, and scribbled through several drafts before getting it “just right,” Hennan said.

Work on the pledge began last summer, when members of the School of Medicine’s Honor Education Council approached Stobo with an idea for a representative student pledge committee. The committee’s initial focus was on students alone, and members first presented the pledge at new student orientation in August 2002. But it was not long before students realized this idea had potential to make a change even outside the student population.

Saavedra says the students themselves came up with the idea for presenting this special message to the whole campus at one memorable event, and they planned all of the promotional activities—a teaser campaign, with a series of table toppers in the student common areas, one day reading “On My Honor,” and then, subsequently, “Integrity,” “Compassion” and “Respect,” with their corresponding dictionary definitions.

The students also sought out the support of their professors, approaching faculty with a request to include the pledge in their course syllabi.

It was no surprise to members of the Honor Pledge Committee that the faculty stood behind this campaign—UTMB’s faculty members are the ones exemplifying daily for students the concepts outlined in the pledge, says committee member Peter Davenport.

Davenport points to the Osler Scholars program—which honors faculty members who personify the ideals of professionalism—as one way in which UTMB drives home for students the importance of behaving with integrity, compassion and respect. “I’ve seen some of these doctors giving patients their home phone numbers and coming to work in the middle of the night to help out however they can,” Davenport said.

These high standards of professionalism are laid before medical students on day one, says Hennan. During the White Coat Ceremony, a rite of passage for new medical students, they learn about the weighty responsibility they have in their dealings with those who come to them for help.

For these students, who are still in the academic phase of their careers, a statement about professionalism serves as a kind of “bridge” to the values they will take with them in their work life, Saavedra said.

Introducing students to the precepts of professionalism—formal instruction in altruism, empathy, compassion, ethical behavior and respect—has become more highly valued at medical schools nationwide in recent years. Indeed, in writing UTMB’s pledge, the Honor Pledge Committee researched similar statements from medical schools around the country.

But Saavedra notes that UTMB’s pledge is unique in that it embraces not only a medical school, but a school of nursing, a school of allied health sciences and a graduate school for biomedical sciences.

And now, thanks to the hard work students invested in Honor Pledge Day, UTMB’s is a pledge adopted not only by students, but by the entire community.

“The students didn’t want the pledge to be something mentioned once, and then forgotten,” Saavedra said. “They wanted it to be really meaningful for UTMB.”