Integrating medical humanities into a pharmaceutical care seminar on dementia

Objective. To design, integrate, and assess the effectiveness of a medical humanities teaching module that focuses on pharmaceutical care for dementia patients.Design. Visual and textual dementia narratives were presented using a combination of teacher and learner-centered approaches with the aim being to highlight patients' and caregivers' needs for empathy and counselling.Assessment. As gauged from pre- and post-experience questionnaires, students highly rated this approach to teaching medical humanities. In-class presentations demonstrated students' increased sensitivity to patient and caregiver needs, while objective learning outcomes demonstrated students' increased knowledge and awareness.Conclusions. Pharmacy students were open to and successfully learned from reading and discussing patient and caregiver narratives, which furthers the discussion on the value of integrating the medical humanities into the curricula of pharmacy and other health sciences.