Opportunities for narrative medicine in dental education and practice, a narrative review

Reflection is one of four components of the experiential learning cycle and is often the one overlooked. This practice can be used in graduate-level health care education, such as medicine and dentistry. This metacognitive practice allows students to conceptualize learning in a clinical setting and apply this knowledge to new scenarios. Reflective practice can be taught using different modalities of narrative medicine, and several studies have studied its effectiveness in areas such as professional development, collaboration, communication among others. Most of these studies, however, have been conducted solely in the medical setting, and narrative medicine may have useful application in the practice and teaching of dentistry.

This literature review examined the outcomes of narrative medicine in medical studies concerning reflection and hypothesized their benefits to dental education. The studies reviewed were chosen by utilizing key term searches of the National Center for Biotechnology Information PubMed library and qualitative factor analysis by study team investigators. Elective-based, prospective enrollment and whole cohort participation programs were analyzed for potential effectiveness in dental education.

The most feasible programs for potential integration into dental curricula are elective-based, small-group, graduate-level courses with a level of evaluation such as residency competencies, as demonstrated by Arntfield et al. CONCLUSION(S): These programs should be investigated further to evaluate their potential in improving reflective skills of students, and ultimately in improving their experiential learning experience.