Making Meaning In The Midst Of Illness - Arts, Humanities And The Lived Experience In Singapore

Living with Duchenne muscular dystrophy has shaped Shalom Lim's understanding of illness, identity and care. Through experiences spanning disability-led arts, healthcare communications, patient advocacy and journalism, he explores how storytelling and lived experience can transform healthcare relationships. Drawing on his work with Rebirth Ensemble, Shalom Medcare, the SingHealth Patient Advocacy Network and Muscular Dystrophy News Today, this session invites participants to reconsider disability beyond diagnosis and embrace more accessible, inclusive, and human-centred approaches to healthcare. Participants will leave with practical insights into partnering with patients as collaborators in creating more humane, inclusive health systems and stronger communities through shared humanity.

Learning Outcomes:

• Appreciate how lived experience can contribute to healthcare education, service design and policy through meaningful patient partnership.

• Explore the role of storytelling, the arts and reflective practice in supporting meaning-making during illness.

• Recognise how disability-led innovation can improve accessibility and patient-centred care across healthcare and community settings.

Target Audience: Healthcare professionals, allied health professionals, medical and nursing students, researchers, educators, patient advocates, caregivers, artists, humanities scholars and anyone interested in patient-centred care, disability, the medical humanities and healthcare innovation.

This talk introduces My Life, My Story (MLMS), a narrative medicine initiative established in 2013 within the United States Veterans Health Administration that has since been adopted across healthcare institutions in the United States. Madhu will share her experience implementing MLMS in a paediatric inpatient setting at Duke Children’s Hospital during her research year at Duke School of Medicine, highlighting how structured patient storytelling can deepen understanding of children and families beyond their diagnoses.

Drawing on findings from her qualitative research, the session will explore how patient narratives reveal dimensions of identity, resilience, relationships, and lived experience that are often overlooked in routine clinical encounters. The talk will also discuss the practical challenges of integrating narrative medicine into busy hospital workflows and consider opportunities for adapting narrative-based approaches within Singapore’s healthcare system. Through clinical stories, research findings, and reflections from implementation, participants will be invited to consider how listening more intentionally to patients’ stories can foster more compassionate, person-centred care.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the principles of narrative medicine and the My Life, My Story programme, including its role in person-centred healthcare.
2. Understand how patient narratives can complement biomedical information by illuminating patients’ values, identities, and lived experiences.
3. Discuss key findings from the implementation and evaluation of My Life, My Story in an inpatient setting.
4. Identify practical barriers and facilitators to incorporating narrative medicine into routine clinical practice.
5. Reflect on strategies for integrating narrative approaches into busy healthcare environments to strengthen therapeutic relationships and improve patient-centred care.

Flow states are optimised by Arts modalities, e.g. music, art poetry, that engage the whole brain. Our experience with using arts-based modalities for team writing may inspire and inform other teams to explore writing for team-building.

Arts-based co-writing can be a means for team-building. Through using the written word, movement, music improvisations, movement, and clay modeling reflectively, healthcare professionals will be able to experience reflective and reflexive practice, applying the principles of self-compassion individually and toward the persons served over the day to day course of their work. We share our process over three writing retreats, showcase the artefacts that were created, and offer strategies that can be used by teams to prioritise self-care, foster deeper appreciation for each other, so that empathy may flow outward.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Learn about music, art, breathing, and movement experiences to enhance the flow of writing as a team-building experience.
2. Understand strategies for reflecting on people, events, and moments that have served to inspire learning or meaningful insights, or build connections at work.
3. Apply the PEMSS (Sawyer, 2023) model for identifying self-care practices

Provides a map to elicit stories, understanding and meaning making of illness.

Learning Outcome:
To have a broad understanding of how to use the Coordinating Stories Map to elicit patient’s stories/”knowing” of their illness and how they make meaning.

- Informal qualitative discussions amongst participants and classroom-based worksheets.