SUMMARY

The article begins with the proposal of two issues: can we understand the professional excellence as an ethical asset?, and which are the moral values or virtues intrinsic to healthcare professions? The answer to the first query is nothing but the verification of the shortcomings that healthcare professions show to properly follow the guides expressed by the first writers of deontological codes: Hippocrates and Confucius. A series of factors, among which highlights the marketization of professions, avoid the former aim to be the public interest and not the several private or corporate interests. Otherwise, the division of knowledge and the professional specialization deprive the professional practice of the humanist inspiration that should have, above all, a profession devoted to the protection of the people's health.

If professionalism should be understood as a virtue, it is convenient to specify what attributes have to constitute, in the event that matters us, the professional excellence. Aristotle, the great theoretician of virtues, serves here as a guide to go on discovering and determining what virtues should make up the healthcare practice. In addition to traditionally recognized moral values, like the benevolence or the respect, emphasis is on the importance of care, a new value that has something to do with the female bigger visibility in society and in the field of healthcare professions. Care is a value that complements the one of justice and gets a stronger relevance in a time in which the patient's cure cannot be anymore the only purpose of Medicine.

When it comes to confidence, a trusting relationship should substitute the classical paternalist relationship that did not take into account the patient's prominence. A series of social, cultural, political, organizational and also ethical changes force the healthcare professions to evolve toward a patient centered model, that takes into account the capability of this person to take decisions on his/her own body, as well as the importance of communication and discussion to face complex and difficult decisions.

Another fundamental virtue in healthcare practice is the classical virtue of prudence that we could redefine today as the capability of self-regulation on the part of professionals. If the standard rule application to the concrete case always requires a certain amount of creativity and common sense, the aforementioned requirement becomes more urgent in the sanitary practice, that has always been pushed to face individualities and singular cases. Bioethics shows that there are some basic principles that define the good clinical practice. However, the theoretic knowledge of the same is clearly insufficient to guarantee the above mentioned good practice, which has to focus on the acquisition of habits, in the willingness to act with correction and justice and on a certain ability to make a decision bearing in mind, above all, the patient's good.

The professional excellence, as it is taken, is equivalent to the exercise of not only the professional responsibility, but the citizen one too. Going back to the starting point, the exercise of any profession should not have the only aim of personal success, but care, in the case of the sanitary professions, for the good of the sick and make a bid for the renown and the dignity that are to be credited to such professions.