Narratives in Medicine

What is Narratives in Medicine?

When patients enter our clinics and hospitals, they bring far more than the constellation of symptoms we might find catalogued in medical textbooks. They arrive with stories—rich, complex accounts of how illness has entered their lives uninvited, disrupting the narratives they had written for themselves. A diagnosis doesn't simply alter physiology; it rewrites biography. It changes how people see themselves, how they move through the world, and how they imagine their futures. At the heart of the Narratives in Medicine program lies a fundamental recognition: that illness is simultaneously a biological and a biographical event. Disease may manifest in laboratory values and imaging studies, but it is lived as story—as the moment a parent can no longer lift their child, as the career ambitions that must be reconsidered, as the quiet fear that accompanies waiting for test results. Each patient's experience of illness is irreducibly unique, shaped by their personal history, their relationships, their beliefs, and the particular contours of their life. We believe that these illness narratives profoundly shape how both patients and healthcare providers perceive disease and how we collectively respond to it. The stories patients tell about their illness—and equally, the stories they cannot yet articulate—influence treatment decisions, affect clinical outcomes, and determine whether the therapeutic encounter becomes one of healing or of alienation. Similarly, the narratives that healthcare providers hold, often implicitly, about patients and their diseases shape the care we deliver, sometimes in ways we don't fully recognize.

Aims of the Program

This program exists to make these narratives visible, to study them, and to cultivate in healthcare professionals the capacity to attend to them with skill and compassion. We are engaged in the essential work of humanizing medicine by teaching clinicians to listen more deeply, to recognize the stories embedded in clinical encounters, and to practice with greater narrative competence.

Leadership and Expertise

Clin Asst Prof Victoria Ekstrom Sze Min is a Consultant Gastroenterologist at Singapore General Hospital, where she leads the Paediatric Onset Liver Disease Program—an initiative designed to support young adults transitioning from pediatric to adult care during this vulnerable phase of their healthcare journey.

Dr Ekstrom holds a Master's in Behavioral Science from the London School of Economics, where she studied patient decision-making and the application of behavioral insights to healthcare outcomes. This expertise in behavioral science complements her clinical work, allowing her to address both the biological and psychological dimensions of patient care.

As Co-Lead of Narratives in Medicine at the SingHealth Duke-NUS Medical Humanities Institute, Dr Ekstrom is passionate about storytelling as a means of fostering deeper connection between patients and healthcare providers. She views narrative medicine not merely as artistic expression but as a rigorous discipline that helps clinicians understand illness from a patient-centered perspective. Through research and reflective practice, narrative medicine enables healthcare professionals to make diagnoses grounded in patients' particular life circumstances, develop stronger communication skills, and cultivate the empathy essential to healing.

Clin Assoc Prof Mok Yee Hui is a Senior Consultant Pediatric Intensivist at KKH's Children's ICU, with interests in pediatric resuscitation, simulation-based training, and narrative medicine. She has led the development of simulation training programs that remain core to pediatric residency education today, including modules on pediatric emergencies and ECMO cannulation. A dedicated medical educator, she has held leadership roles in general pediatric and pediatric intensive care training in Singapore.

Her focus has since expanded to narrative medicine and reflective practice, exploring how storytelling builds empathy and trust between clinicians, patients, and families. She has led research on reflective writing among residents, championed family-centered care in the ICU, and has completed the Certificate in Professional Studies in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. Her current research explores the impact of narrative medicine on perspective-taking, well-being, and professionalism in pediatric residency training.

Scope of the Program

Building a Community of Practice

Our work unfolds across multiple dimensions. We are systematically building narrative capacity across SingHealth Duke-NUS by sponsoring faculty to complete the Columbia University Narrative Medicine certification, an intensive training that develops the close reading, reflective writing, and attentive listening skills essential to narrative practice. These trained faculty become ambassadors for narrative approaches throughout our institutions, creating ripples of change in how we understand clinical work.

We have established HEART (Healthcare Experiences and Reflective Tales), https://www.heartbysdmhi.com, a Substack publication that serves as a gathering place for our growing community of practice. Through this platform, we share reflections on clinical encounters, explore the intersection of medicine and the humanities, and create space for healthcare professionals to engage with the narrative dimensions of their work. HEART binds together practitioners across disciplines and institutions who recognize that medicine is, at its core, an interpretive practice.

Our experiential workshops bring narrative medicine into embodied practice. We have facilitated art therapy-based sessions for neonatologists navigating the complex emotional terrain of neonatal intensive care, for leadership teams at Eastern Health Alliance seeking to understand their institutional narratives, and for primary care physicians grappling with the challenges of continuity and connection in contemporary practice. These workshops create rare spaces where healthcare professionals can explore their own responses to illness narratives and develop new ways of being present with patients.

We are also engaged in the long-term project of integrating narrative medicine into residency training. By introducing young physicians to narrative approaches early in their careers, we hope to shape a generation of clinicians for whom attention to story is not an optional addition to clinical practice but an integral part of it.

Advancing Scholarship

Beyond education and community building, Narratives in Medicine is committed to rigorous research that examines how narratives function in healthcare settings. We are investigating questions that sit at the intersection of the humanities and clinical medicine: How do ambient AI documentation systems affect the narrative structure of medical records, and what is lost or gained when clinical stories are algorithmically mediated? What narrative patterns emerge in conversations between doctors and patients in Singaporean hospital settings, and how do these patterns reflect broader cultural approaches to illness and care? How can narrative interventions be implemented at scale in healthcare systems, and what outcomes—clinical, relational, and institutional—can we measure?

Our research draws on diverse methodological traditions, from conversation analysis and discourse studies to implementation science and qualitative inquiry. We are building an evidence base for narrative medicine that complements its humanistic foundation, demonstrating not only why narrative matters philosophically but also how it functions practically in the daily work of healthcare delivery. Through this scholarship, we aim to contribute to the growing international literature on narrative medicine while remaining attentive to the particular contexts and concerns of Asian healthcare systems.

An Invitation

The Narratives in Medicine program represents an ongoing commitment to medicine as both a scientific and a humanistic endeavor. We recognize that the most sophisticated diagnostic algorithms and therapeutic interventions must ultimately be brought into conversation with the particular story of each patient's life. In cultivating narrative competence—the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by stories of illness—we work toward a healthcare system that is not only more effective but also more humane. We invite all who share this vision to join us in this work.