Beyond empathy: a qualitative exploration of arts and humanities in pre-professional (baccalaureate) health education

Abstract

For nearly four decades, researchers have explored the integration of arts and humanities content into health professions education (HPE). However, enduring controversies regarding the purpose, efficacy, and implementation of humanities initiatives suggest that the timing and context of trainees' exposure to such content is a key, but seldom considered, factor. To better understand the affordances of introducing humanities-based health curriculum prior to the HPE admissions gateway, we conducted a qualitative instrumental case study with participants from Canada's first Health Humanities baccalaureate program. Fully anonymized transcripts from semi-structured interviews (n = 11) and focus groups (n = 14) underwent an open-coding procedure for thematic narrative analysis to reveal three major temporal domains of described experience (i.e., prior to, during, and following their participation in a 12-week semester-long "Introduction to Health Humanities" course). Our findings demonstrate that perceptions of arts-and humanities content in health education are generated well in advance of HPE admission. Among other findings, we define a new concept-epistemological multicompetence-to describe participants' emergent capability to toggle between (and advocate for the role of) multiple disciplines, arts and humanities particularly, in health-related teaching and learning at the pre-professional level. Improved coordination of baccalaureate and HPE curricula may therefore enhance the development of capabilities associated with arts and humanities, including: epistemological multicompetence, aesthetic sensibility, and other sought-after qualities in HPE candidates. In conclusion, attending to the pre-professional admissions gateway presents a new, capabilitiesdriven approach to enhancing both the implementation and critical understanding of arts and humanities' purpose, role, and effects across the "life course" of health professions education.

A gameful blended-learning experience in nursing: A qualitative focus group study

“…In comparison to other teaching approaches and consistent with other studies, the freedom of choice in their own learning process and online team-based learning fostered other key clinical competencies required in nursing practice, such as creativity, innovation for decision-making or problem solving, or criticism (Tehranineshat and Rakhshan, 2018). One possible explanation for these findings may be a lack of value in teaching nonscientific aspects of care, especially given that content-driven teaching is still the most common style in many nursing faculties (Costa et al, 2020;Rieger et al, 2020). Although some people may think that these competencies are innate, research suggests that everyone can be creative or innovative to some extent, with some being more so than others (Yuen and Balakrishnan, 2019).…”

Developing New Academic Programs in the Medical/Health Humanities: A Toolkit to Support Continued Growth

“…Survey results also revealed significant variability in approaches to program development, which is unsurprising given the fundamental interdisciplinarity of the field and the multitude of distinct program goals, objectives, formats, and emphases across institutions. Program leadership and institutional support across varied arenas reflect a common desire to serve a growing constituency of students interested in the intersectionality of the "human" dimension in the context of health and healthcare (Klugman 2018(Klugman , 2017Costa et al 2020).…”

“…This shared vision has generated a wide array of innovative pedagogies and programs, which are the crux of the medical/health humanities. So, while disparate, medical/health humanities programs are grounded in the belief that the humanities can best prepare graduates who are discerning participants in healthcare and its processes (Klugman 2018(Klugman , 2017Berry, Jones and Lamb 2017;Costa et al 2020). Given this field's inherent characteristics, a centralized, online toolkit that is crowdsourced, that promotes discourse, that allows development of customized programs, and that is user-friendly is warranted and desired by the diverse yet cohesive audience it is meant to serve.…”

Quantitative Analysis of Visual Representation of Sign Elements in COVID-19 Context

“…In a systematic review, the authors Costa, Kangasjarvi, and Charise (2020) provide us with the following data on the benefits of applying the humanities to the field of health: «(…) proponents of ‘medical humanities’ have argued that by encouraging attention to less overtly clinical aspects of healthcare, humanities-engaged clinical education helps build social and relational skills, often by fostering empathy and moral development; compassion; self-reflection; interpersonal skills; perspective-taking; openness to otherness; critical reflection; and tolerance for ambiguity.» (p. 1204).…”