Using visual art and collaborative reflection to explore medical attitudes toward vulnerable persons

Abstract

Background: Vulnerable persons often face stigma-related barriers while seeking health care. Innovative education and professional development methods are needed to help change this.Method: We describe an interdisciplinary group workshop designed around a discomfiting oil portrait, intended to trigger provocative conversations among health care students and practitioners, and we present our mixed methods analysis of participant reflections.Results: After the workshop, participants were significantly more likely to endorse the statements that the observation and interpretive skills involved in viewing visual art are relevant to patient care and that visual art should be used in medical education to improve students’ observational skills, narrative skills, and empathy with their patients. Subsequent to the workshop, significantly more participants agreed that art interpretation should be required curriculum for health care students. Qualitative comments from two groups from two different education and professional contexts were examined for themes; conversations focused on issues of power, body image/self-esteem, and lessons for clinical practice. Conclusions: We argue that difficult conversations about affective responses to vulnerable persons are possible in a collaborative context using well-chosen works of visual art that can stand in for a patient.

Art in Medical Education: A Review

“…A total of 37 curricular interventions that discussed the implementation of art in medical education were identified for full-text screening. Upon further review, 28 articles were selected for inclusion owing to their detailed methodologies and analyses, including 16 describing art education with medical students (TABLE 1) [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] and 12 involving residents (TABLE 2). 12,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] Some interventions relied on professional art curators to teach fine art to participants, while others used artistically minded clinicians.…”

“…6,8,16,18 Three of these 4 achieved a statistically significant increase in observational skills. 6,8,16 Thirteen [3][4][5][6][7][9][10][11][13][14][15]17,19 of the 16 were led by art educators and were primarily qualitative in nature, while 9 incorporated a quantitative component. [5][6][7][8]11,13,[16][17][18] Two interventions (one quantitative and one qualitative) showed a dose-dependent response between the number of art sessions participants attended and the level of improvement in observational skills.…”

Importancia de la apreciación estética en la formación del médico

“…Se ha estimado que el 65 % de las universidades norteamericanas incluyen actividades de arte en el aprendizaje de la medicina 8 , encontrándose dentro de ellas algunas tan relevantes como Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, Nueva York, etc., junto con las mencionadas anteriormente 9 . Esta actividad se utiliza también, con los mismos fines, en universidades de Canadá 10,11 , Australia 12 y en algunas europeas del Reino Unido 7 y Noruega 13 .…”

Folk Paper-cutting Patterns in Visual Art

“…In the process of collecting paper-cut images, due to problems with books, machines, etc, a certain degree of noise pollution, the image becomes blurred, and post-processing becomes difficult. The purpose of preprocessing is to improve the quality of paper-cut images, remove noise, restore useful actual information, improve the detection possibilities of related information, greatly simplify data, and improve the accuracy of feature extraction, image segmentation, matching and recognition [7].…”