Professional values and behaviours

Why this matters on day one

This is the domain that fails people. Knowledge gaps are visible and fixable; a pattern of not raising concerns, not recognising your limits or not documenting honestly is what ends careers. It is also the domain the CPSA weights most heavily outside pure clinical content, because it is the one that cannot be revised the night before.

What the domain requires

1. 1Professional behaviour. Act with honesty and integrity, maintain boundaries, respect confidentiality, and behave as a member of a profession rather than an individual — including on social media.
2. 2Patient safety and quality improvement. Recognise risk, report incidents and near-misses, understand human factors, and know how audit and QI actually change practice. You are expected to participate, not just approve of the idea.
3. 3Dealing with complexity and uncertainty. Make and justify decisions on incomplete information, tolerate not knowing, and communicate that honestly to patients and colleagues.
4. 4Safeguarding and vulnerability. Recognise abuse and neglect in children and adults, know the threshold for raising a concern is suspicion rather than proof, and act on it.
5. 5Leadership and team working. Understand your role in a team, hand over safely, escalate appropriately, and speak up across a hierarchy when something is wrong.
6. 6Ethics and law. Apply capacity, consent, confidentiality and the legal frameworks that govern practice in the UK.

What evidencing it looks like

• An incident report you filed and what changed as a result.
• A reflection on a case where you were uncertain and how you handled it — including what you got wrong.
• A safeguarding concern you raised, appropriately anonymised.
• An audit or QI project where you can state the measured change, not just the intervention.
• Multi-source feedback that comments on your reliability and how you work with others.

What falls short

• Reflections that describe events without examining your own contribution — "the ward was busy" is not a reflection.
• Treating incident reporting as blame-allocation rather than learning, and therefore avoiding it.
• Deferring every difficult conversation upwards instead of developing the skill.
• Confusing professionalism with deference: not challenging a senior about a safety issue is a failure of this domain, not politeness.

Demonstrated by