Can Medical Humanities impart Empathy and Resilience skills to Medical Students?

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. The contribution of the Medical Humanities to a comprehensive medical education has been discussed elsewhere ( Schamroth, 2018), but what has been difficult to demonstrate is whether it has any measurable quantitative impact on improving student's empathy or resilience. This small project was an attempt to further explore this question. Medical students at University College London Medical School spend approximately one day a month during their first clinical year within a primary care setting in a programme called "Medicine in the Community" (MIC). The structure of the day involves students seeing patients under the supervision of primary care physicians. In this ethically approved research project (University College London, 2017) conducted over the academic year 2017-2018, a non-selected group of 24 students, received a compressed version of this MIC programme in the morning and in the afternoon were exposed to medical humanities. This included discussing poetry with a medical focus, creative writing based on the students own clinical experiences, watching and listening to carefully selected opera scenes where a health-related issue was illustrated and finally an experiential group based psychotherapy process using body mapping which facilitated the exploration of the interrelationship between mind and body. A second group of 18 medical students who received the conventional MIC experience acted as the control. Both groups were given empathy and resilience questionnaires at the beginning and end of the academic year. The results showed that the students who experienced the afternoon humanities programme scored significantly higher in 3 of the 20 empathy questions than the control group and better in the resilience questionnaire, although the latter did not reach statistical significance.