Mindfulness and the Making of Meaning in a Medical Humanities Core Program in Undergraduate Medical Education
Speaker: Chan Li Chong
Format: Audio & Slides

Medical schools worldwide aspire to produce graduates to be professionally competent and to take an ethical approach in the practice of clinical medicine. Whilst the training of such graduates takes advantage of the best practices available in teaching, learning and assessment in the medical curriculum, it often fails to address the complex and demanding nature of clinical practice with the result that many doctors experience low morale, burnout and a feeling of general despondency as to whether this was the job they were supposed to do when they sign up for medical school.

In 2012, the LKS Faculty of Medicine launched a 6 year longitudinal core medical humanities program In which the heart of the program is to enable all 210 medical students to explore themes linked to human suffering and healing, not just for patients and for themselves too as healthcare professionals. The medical humanities program incorporate five themes – doctors and patients stories; death, dying and bereavement; culture, spirituality and healing; history of medicine and humanitarianism/social justice – and delivered through the genres of literature and narrative, film, visual arts and performance. A key part of the medical humanities program is Mindfulness training in which medical students will be asked to explore their own feelings, emotions, thoughts and intention of who they are (person behind the white coat) and through exercises that hopefully will enable them to negotiate with greater awareness and skills the nature of the patient's needs and expectations in situations often at times fraught with uncertainty, tension, ambiguity and conflict.

In my presentation, I will discuss the conceptual framework of our medical humanities program; the teaching, learning and assessment activities; what we have learnt so far as we move into the second year of our program, and how we plan to use mindfulness to give meaning to the medical humanities program by connecting the heart and the mind of students through opening up their awareness of what it means to be a doctor whilst maintaining a sense of well-being throughout the entire career of their medical practice. Given each student will have 3 hours of protected time for mindfulness training each year in the 6 year medical humanities program, the challenge is to how to ensure students build mindfulness as they move from beyond the formal classroom into their working and daily lives.