15469. COMBATING DECLINING PROFESSIONALISM IN HEALTHCARE. Focusing on provider-patient relations (primarily physician-patient) and physicians' ethical responsibilities to patients, this paper examines declining professionalism and professional ethics in contemporary medicine. The essay is organized into three main parts. Part one defines professionalism and its components within the context of medicine. Part two examines the decline in medical professional ethics in recent years, considering some of the possible causes for the decline. Part three considers some of the steps which might be taken to address the problem of declining professionalism. KEYWORDS: physicians nurses health professions term paper medical professionalism essay. APA Style. 10 pages, 28 footnotes, 19 bibliographic references.