Integrating humanities and medicine: A communication-oriented framework for collaborative research, teaching and knowledge exchange/ impact activities

Abstract

In the last decade there has been a growing appreciation of the crucial role of humanities in the education and professional development of pre-and post-qualification healthcare professionals. It is now widely acknowledged that to provide holistic healthcare, professionals need to focus not just on curing the disease and the symptoms; they also need to be aware and take into account patients’ and carers’ experiences and psychosocial issues. Equally important is the understanding of the physical and mental well-being of the healthcare professionals themselves. To engage with this more holistic understanding of healthcare, Medical Humanities are now included into the syllabi of many medical schools around the world, and scholars in both medicine and humanities are engaging in collaborative research, teaching and knowledge exchange/ impact activities. In this talk I will begin with a brief overview of the role of Medical Humanities in medical education and professional development. I will draw on recent studies in a number of Western contexts and discuss several frameworks as to how this integration between medicine and humanities is approached. I will then present the on-going collaborative work between the members of the Health Communication Research Cluster (HCRC) at the University of Hong Kong. The HCRC has been developing an ambitious health communication agenda that pursues two major objectives, namely to promote leading-edge research on health communication in the Region; and to integrate this research into professional practice and training, recognizing that effective communication is crucial to successful health care deliveries. The HCRC stresses the close interrelation and synergy between research, practice and training. It takes an evidence-based, data driven approach to researching healthcare communication and advocates a shift from skills-based prescriptive approach to developing an active awareness of various communication issues among professionals through a range of teaching and training activities. To exemplify these ideas I will draw on two recent projects on risk communication and decision-making in genetic counselling contexts in Hong Kong that involved collection of several corpora of authentic discourse data in genetic counselling clinics and integrating the research findings based on those data into a wide range of research, teaching and knowledge exchange/ impact activities. In conclusion I will highlight the important issue of the extent to which the frameworks and practices of Medical Humanities that have been established in the Western contexts are applicable to developing Medical Humanities in other sociocultural contexts.