The Messages of Medical Humanities Education: What Educators Convey and How This Affects Medical Trainees’ Clinical Training

The practice of medicine is both an art and a science. Nowadays, when scientific and technical progresses appear to have made medicine into a much more objective and rational profession, there remains an element of medical practice which is more akin to art than science. This perspective takes the claim of the art of medicine more seriously with the field known as the medical humanities. However, recent arguments on the value of the humanities represent an expanding genre of passionate defenses aimed at academia, governing institutions and general society. There is medical humanities education reform in the pre-clinical years of the new 6-year medical education in Taiwan. Here, medical humanities have been emphasized in the reform in order to insure the reflective capabilities of physicians toward the welfare of their patients and nation. However, what are the origins and the ‘messages’ from program developers, directors, or educators? Although the medical humanities has been a key area identified by the Ministry of Science and Technology for research for a number of years, a nuanced understanding of exactly what it comprises is an area that has been under-studied in Taiwan, This programme of research seeks to develop a deeper understanding of what comprises the Medical Humanities in Taiwan, what the rationale(s) for implementing the Medical Humanities are, whether the syllabi match the rationales and whether learners have the same understanding of those rationales. It also seeks to understand whether there is any evidence of the efficacy of the Medical Humanities in Taiwan in terms of how medical students are assessed within the Medical Humanities curricular and how the Medical Humanities are achieving their goals in the clinical setting? These areas deserve to be further examined.Aim: 1. To clarify the effects of Medical Humanities education on learners in clinical training and how it works in a clinical training of Asian context. 2. To analyse the syllabus and then examine the topics of Medical Humanities in medical schools in Taiwan. 3. To investigate the rationales that Medical Humanities educators, program directors, policy makers and learners have around the Medical Humanities to see whether there is a miss-match across and between them. Research design: This programme of research comprises 4 phases of work as follows:Phase 1: A systematic review (meta-analysis) of the literature (August 2018-December 2018)Phase 2: A systematic analysis of the Medical Humanities syllabi in Taiwan (January 2019 – July 2019)Phase 3: A qualitative one-to-one interview study of Medical Humanities educators and program developers August 2019 – January 2020)Phase 4: A qualitative group interview study of Medical Humanities learners (October 2019 – July 2020) Participants:For Phases 3 and 4, 30 program developers or directors of medical humanities and 60 medical trainees will be enrolled.

Project ID:PF10708-1010
External Project ID:MOST107-2511-H182-013