Luminary Learning Gastrointestinal Disorder- Issue 1

46  • LUMINARY LEARNING: GASTROINTESTINAL DISORDERS and commissioned work and is part of a process to award payment by private insurance compa- nies for private healthcare. Credentialing is no longer just of interest or relevance to private insur- ance companies, but is increasingly relevant to doctors, nurses and the allied health professions working in healthcare who have to undergo revalidation every 3–5 years and who need to secure personal and professional indemnity insurance. While doctors currently go through a revalida- tion process it was a recommendation of the inquiry in the Mid Staffordshire Hospital inquiry [8] that nurses will also have to undertake this process of professional revalidation in the UK in the future. Social IdentityTheory argues that the person’s concept of self comes from the groups to which the person belongs. The person will have multiple selves and identities with their affiliated groups. There is also a psychological process of us aligning ourselves to the ‘ingroup’ and identifying the groups we don’t belong to as the ‘outgroups’. There are three processes that develop the in/out group thinking: zz Social Categorisation—we categorise people in order to understand and identify them. In rela- tion to the scope of practice of a professional group, we begin to know what categories we belong to and understand things about ourselves, defining and explaining appropriate behav- iour according to the group we belong to. We can belong to several groups at the same time. zz Social Identification—we adopt the identity of the group that we belong to and act in ways that we understand and perceive we need to act in. In relation to the scope of practice of a profession, we develop an emotional significance to that identification and our self-esteem will depend on it. zz Social Comparison—after we have categorised ourselves within a group and identify ourselves as being members of that group, we tend to compare our group (the ingroup) against other groups (the outgroups). To maintain self-esteem we will compare our group favourably against other ones. A group will tend to view members of competing groups negatively to increase self-esteem. Social Identity Theory is always evidenced within a given context and with healthcare employ- ing many different professional clinical roles and non-clinical roles, there will be significant oppor- tunities to observe the effects of SIT. Studies have illustrated that extreme hostility can be induced by putting people into groups and then manipulating intergroup relations [9, 10]. Where groups exist in competition, where one's gain is other's loss—members will feel and act negatively towards each other. The theory calls against blaming individuals who respond to such arbitrary groupings and proposes that minimal conditions are necessary and sufficient to produce negativity towards outgroups. Studies have shown that the mere act of dividing people into groups can create antago- nism. We define ourselves through the groups to which we belong. Social identities are much more than self perceptions: they also have value and emotional significances. To the extent that we define ourselves in terms of the group membership, our sense of self-esteem attaches to the fate of the group (and hence the fate of a fellow group members is pertinent to our own) [9]. The social nature of the bond is primary rather than secondary and we identify with others through our common link to a leader. This could explain how clinicians will feel a closer sense of connection to their Royal College with a secondary connection to the corporate values of the organisation. We are bound together through our joint sense of belonging to the same category as our primary purpose.