"Charon, Rita"

On 7 May 2020, Columbia University Global Centers hosted an online international symposium on ethical dilemmas during the COVID-19 pandemic. This interdisciplinary engagement between philosophers and Covid medical professionals reports the challenges as well as the discrepancies between ethical guidelines and reality. This collection of presentations identifies four key ethical dilemmas regarding responsibility, fairness, dignity and honouring death. In looking into accountability and consistency in medical humanities, it examines whether the contextuality of coronavirus across countries and cultures affected the ethical decision-making processes...

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Interprofessional education (IPE) is a critical component of medical education and is affected by the characteristics of the clinical teams in which students and residents train. However, clinical teams are often shaped by professional silos and hierarchies which may hinder interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP). Narrative medicine, a branch of health humanities that focuses on close reading, reflective writing, and sharing in groups, could be an innovative approach for improving IPE and IPCP. In this report, we describe the structure, feasibility, and a process-oriented program evaluation of a narrative medicine program implemented in interprofessional team meetings in three academic primary care clinics...

The day-to-day rigors of medical education often preclude learners from gaining a longitudinal perspective on who they are becoming. Furthermore, the current focus on competencies, coupled with concerning rates of trainee burnout and a decline in empathy, have fueled the search for pedagogic tools to foster students' reflective capacity. In response, many scholars have looked to the tradition of narrative medicine to foster "reflective spaces" wherein holistic professional identity construction can be supported...

The author notes the impressive growth in medical humanities programs, scholarly journals, textbooks, and national and international conferences as well as the convening of two recent national forums or boards addressing the potential of the humanities and the arts to improve medical practice. She also notes that the field of medical humanities seems to have shifted from addressing topics on the margins of medical education to equipping students with the foundational skills required for effective doctoring...

Medical educators increasingly have embraced literary and narrative means of pedagogy, such as the use of learning portfolios, reading works of literature, reflective writing, and creative writing, to teach interpersonal and reflective aspects of medicine. Outcomes studies of such pedagogies support the hypotheses that narrative training can deepen the clinician's attention to a patient and can help to establish the clinician's affiliation with patients, colleagues, teachers, and the self. In this article, the authors propose that creative writing in particular is useful in the making of the physician...

OBJECTIVE: This paper describes a reflective learning program within a larger curriculum on behavioral and social science that makes use of close reading, written representation of experience, discussion, and textual response. This response may in turn lead to further reflection, representation, and response in a circular pattern. A unique feature of this program is that it pays attention to the representation itself as the pivotal activity within reflective learning. Using the narrative methods that are the hallmark of this program, faculty writings were analyzed to characterize the essential benefits that derive from these practices...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

PURPOSE: To learn what medical students derive from training in humanities, social sciences, and the arts in a narrative medicine curriculum and to explore narrative medicine's framework as it relates to students' professional development. METHOD: On completion of required intensive, half-semester narrative medicine seminars in 2010, 130 second-year medical students at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons participated in focus group discussions of their experiences...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

OBJECTIVE: This study sought to explore the perceived influence of narrative medicine training on clinical skill development of fourth-year medical students, focusing on competencies mandated by ACGME and the RCPSC in areas of communication, collaboration, and professionalism. METHODS: Using grounded-theory, three methods of data collection were used to query twelve medical students participating in a one-month narrative medicine elective regarding the process of training and the influence on clinical skills...

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New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 367, Issue 20, Page 1878-1881, November 2012.

This commentary reflects on the first decade of the Teaching and Learning Moments (TLM) feature of Academic Medicine. The author places the feature within the context of a growing movement within health care to improve reflective practice through the practice of reflective writing and reading. As an example of the opportunity these reflective activities afford, the author depicts a seminar in which students and faculty from four health sciences schools learn together about culture, illness, and health care...

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Recognizing clinical medicine as a narrative undertaking fortified by learnable skills in understanding stories has helped doctors and teachers to face otherwise vexing problems in medical practice and education in the areas of professionalism, medical interviewing, reflective practice, patient-centered care, and self-awareness. The emerging practices of narrative medicine give clinicians fresh methods with which to make contact with patients and to come to understand their points of view. This essay provides a brief review of narrative theory regarding the structure of stories, suggesting that clinical texts contain and can reveal information in excess of their plots...

Reflective writing is being introduced in many medical schools in the United States and abroad for a variety of reasons and with a variety of goals in mind. As Wald and colleagues write, multiple methods, including the rubric introduced in their study, have been proposed for rating or grading this writing to quantify the gains obtained. The authors of this commentary detail the assumptions both about reflection and about writing implied in Wald and colleagues' work. They then describe a reciprocal model of writing as discovery, suggesting that the writing itself is what teaches the skills of reflection...