Narrative medicine and humanities for health professions education: an experimental study

Narrative medicine can serve as a tool to empathize with human beings' predicament and suffering. The research intended to examine whether the use of narrative medicine to form an empathetic connection could bring any positive impacts on health professions students.

A two-group quasi-experimental design was adopted to examine whether the intervention of narrative medicine to form an empathetic connection could demonstrate differences between the experimental group (35 students) and the control group (32 students) with regard to professional identity, self-reflection, emotional catharsis, and reflective writing competency. These 67 participants were health professions students in a medical university (mean age = 20.02; SD = 0.23), with varied majors in health disciplines. The 16-week intervention was the use of narrative medicine to form an empathetic connection with those suffering, via the three stages of narrative medicine: attention → representation → affiliation. The quantitative instruments included a professional identity scale (PIS-HSP), a reflective thinking scale (RTS-HSP), and an emotional catharsis scale (ECS-IN), as well as an analytic reflective writing scoring rubric (ARWSR-HSP). To triangulate the quantitative results, the study also used the student interviews. The SPSS software was used to analyze the data.

The quantitative results demonstrated that the narrative medicine-based intervention could bring positive effects on the health professions students. After going through the intervention, the students in the experimental group had stronger professional identity, a higher reflective thinking level, more emotional catharsis, and greater improvement in reflective writing competency than those not receiving the intervention, though some subscales not reaching statistical significance.

This research results proved that the use of narrative medicine to form an empathetic connection could bring positive impacts on health professions students regarding professional identity, self-reflection, emotional catharsis, and self-reflective writing competency.