Objectives: The authors sought to explore how a curriculum that uses a patient experience simulation followed by reflection can lead to clinical empathy in learners and whether this experience leads to behavioral change. Further, in response to critiques of common pragmatic approaches to clinical empathy teaching in which empathy is operationalized and taught through formal trainings and checklists, the study aimed to contribute insights regarding how clinical empathy may best be taught to health profession students.
Methods: Twenty-six senior medical students participated in an in situ patient experience simulation during a 4-month period in 2021-2022 in an academic emergency department.
Background: Emergency medicine (EM) residents face unique affective challenges and barriers to interpersonal connection in their clinical environment which may contribute to decreased empathy and increased burnout. Narrative medicine (NM) might address these barriers and has had beneficial impacts in various populations but has never been studied in EM residents. In this study, we sought to evaluate the effect of NM workshops on burnout and empathy and to assess resident perceptions of the workshops.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper introduces an innovative curricular approach-the Health Humanities Portrait Approach (Portrait Approach)-and its pedagogical tool-the Health Humanities Portrait (HHP). Both enable health professions learners to examine pressing social issues that shape, and are shaped by, experiences of health and illness. The Portrait Approach is grounded in a set of "critical portraiture" principles that foster humanities-driven analytical skills.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProblem: A disconnect exists between caregivers and health care providers, resulting in fragmented communication, which increases caregiver stress and compromises patient care. Although providers have a responsibility to recognize caregiver burden, they receive scant training on issues important to caregivers.
Approach: From 2014 to 2017, as part of the Building Caregiver Partnerships Through Interprofessional Education project-a collaborative effort between Northeast Ohio Medical University and Summa Health-the authors developed curricula to foster effective partnerships between health care providers and caregivers by exposing medical students and residents to highly personal caregiving narratives.
Background And Objective: Families are the backbone of our long-term care system, managing complicated illnesses, providing direct care, and assisting with the day-to-day functioning of elderly patients. Medical education, however, provides students with little, if any, exposure to the challenges faced by family caregivers or how best to communicate with them to optimize patient care. We assessed the value of an educational program combining film and discussion as a means of sensitizing third-year medical students to caregiver issues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCategories are essential to doctors' thinking and reasoning about their patients. Much of the clinical categorization learned in medical school serves useful purposes, but an extensive literature exists on students' reliance on broad systems of social categorization. In this article, the authors challenge some of the orthodoxies of categorization by combining narrative approaches to medical practice with the theoretical term "intersectionality" to draw students' attention to the important intersecting, but often overlooked, identities of their patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSince the emergence of the field in the 1970s, several trends have begun to challenge the original assumptions, claims, and practices of what became known as the medical humanities. In this article, the authors make the case for the health humanities as a more encompassing label because it captures recent theoretical and pedagogical developments in higher education such as the shift from rigid disciplinary boundaries to multi- and interdisciplinary inquiry, which has transformed humanities curricula in health professions. Calling the area of study health humanities also underscores the crucial distinction between medicine and health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt would be unusual to find a current medical school administrator or faculty member who has not heard the phrase "literature and medicine" or who does not know that literature is taught in various forms-short stories, novels, poems, essays-at many points in the curriculum at U.S. medical schools.
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