Empathy and the Medical Humanities
Date: 16 Sep 2022, Friday | Time: 1620 - 1750 | Track Type: Main Conference Workshop | Format: Face-to-face | Venue: Seminar Room L2-S3 & L2-S4, Academia
Speakers: Assoc Prof Warren Fong, Dr Crystal Lim & Ms Min Chiam
Please note that this workshop is in high demand and is currently oversubscribed. All new registrants will be placed on a waiting list and will be notified by 9 September should there be available spots. Kindly accept our apologies that you will not be able to attend the workshop in the event you do not hear from us.
Empathy is important in establishing a therapeutic relationship, but medical professionals may feel overwhelmed or lost when trying to convey empathy. Empathy can be nurtured using the medical humanities, such as through film, literary, historical and autobiographical narratives. Illness narratives and the movies are provoking, impactful, interesting and effective tools for fostering empathy and self-awareness in healthcare professionals.
In caring for patients, physicians must shift from the biomedical disease framework to an illness concept to appreciate patients’ experience of being ill and navigating treatment and care. This requires physician empathy. Practitioners needs effective tools to allow their natural empathy to manifest and enhance their skills in correctly identifying patients’ emotions and delivering empathetic response. This experiential workshop draws from medical humanities, specifically the use of movies, literary, historical and autobiographical narratives. Participants will learn, hands-on, ways to foster doctors and medical students’ ability to identify and interpret patients’ cognitive and emotional experience, and convey empathetic response.
The symposium comprises three segments:
Participants will learn the use of movies to facilitate reflective discourse and teach empathetic patient communication. Movies evoke and provoke, providing rich emotional and intellectual content in illness portrayal, and sensitising viewers to patients’ plight. Movies raise self-awareness and challenges perspectives and prejudices in diversity issues such as race, class and sexual orientation.
Participants will also learn to better understand features of clinical and patient narratives and how the human body is rendered differently. This segment will use case histories, literary, and media resources to expand and deepen ways of approaching illness, suffering and pain through close reading strategies.
Learning Outcome(s):
By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
A pre-post survey will be conducted to ascertain if the learning outcomes were achieved.
Target Audience:
Healthcare professionals, medical educators and medical students. There is no pre-requisite for this workshop.
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