Building New Bridges: New Connections And Innovations In Health Humanities Education In Singapore

Date: 21 October, Wednesday | Time: 09:00 - 12:00 | Venue: Academia Room, L1-S3

Speakers: Assoc Prof Nicola Ngiam & Assoc Prof Michael Dunn

Programme Description: 

In global terms, education in the health humanities in Singapore is in its infancy. But, despite this, pockets of educational excellence and innovations in instructional design are surfacing across the local medical schools and other health professional training schools. Other national collaborative exchanges between likeminded educators, health practitioners, artistic practitioners and others are also emerging and fostering new ideas and ways of thinking about humanities education.

There is value in sharing ideas for how health humanities education in health professional training should evolve. Currently, educators and practitioners operate largely in silos, and are developing initiatives that reflect institutional priorities or that reflect their own training, expertise, or skillset.

In this workshop, we will adopt a whole-of-island approach to bring together stakeholders interested in delivering health humanities education to health professionals and students. The aim is to share experiences and innovate at the intersection between the humanities and healthcare. The aim of this workshop is to generate learning experiences that link learning outcomes to the practice of healthcare and that are feasible in the local context. We set out to ‘work as one’ despite our varied backgrounds, responsibilities, and contexts to:

1. Share, recognise, review and endorse good practice in health humanities education within health professional training settings,
2. Identify pathways to translate, scale up and strengthen new educational initiatives
3. Strengthen the network of local health humanities educators

The workshop will be made up of 5 segments over 3 hrs (including a 20-minute tea break).

• Introductions and warm up (20 mins)
• What is the state of play? – Sharing across different health professional educational settings about what they are doing and what is working well – to share across the universities, across different health professional training schools, and across the healthcare clusters. (30 mins)
• Where do we want to get to? – Shift to agenda setting. What is the aspirational vision for the future of health humanities education in Singapore, and how can this vision be enacted across institutional settings? (30 mins)
• How do we get there? – an opportunity to tap on practitioner experience and ideas to develop potentially novel and impactful educational initiatives. Collaborative thinking to build on feasible ideas to encourage the spark to come to fruition. (60 mins)
• How do we support each other? - connect with people with ideas that you would like to pursue. Find ways to continue the conversation. (20 mins)

Learning outcomes:

• Shared understanding of existing good practices in health humanities education provided in health professional training settings in Singapore
• Opportunities to develop nationally relevant and feasible ideas through interdisciplinary collaboration to push health humanities in medical education forward

Assessed by qualitative discussion across the workshop and noted down for post-workshop email sharing amongst the participants.

Target audience:

• All educators and practitioners involved and/or interested in delivering health humanities education to health professional students or trainees
• All students with similar interests

Max participants: 40