Speaking up against unsafe unprofessional behaviours: the difficulty in knowing when and how

Patient safety is a core focus now in medical education, with an increasing number of training programmes educating learners about its key tenets.1–3 Residents now undergo formal training about the importance of contributing to a culture of safety by speaking up to avoid errors or harm, but still face difficulties enacting these behaviours in practice.4 In this issue of the journal, Martinez et al have attempted to tease out differences in speaking-out behaviours between traditional and professionalism-related patient safety threats.5 The authors have raised several interesting points worthy of further exploration. In this editorial we focus on unprofessional behaviour as a potential threat to patient safety and propose some new ways of thinking about how to integrate research and lessons from both the patient safety and professionalism literature.

In the study by Martinez and colleagues, residents reported witnessing unprofessional...

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