Tensions in Patient and Family Partner Storytelling in Clinical Education: Navigating the Who, What and How of...

Increasingly, patient and family partners (PFPs) are asked to tell their stories in clinical education. Recognizing that current inclusion practices may not meaningfully shift power relations among PFPs, clinical teachers and learners, we sought to understand how power influences PFP storytelling in clinical education, with a focus on the tensions that PFPs may experience related to the knowledge that they hold and their status as knowers.

We recruited 11 PFP volunteers from an academic hospital in Toronto, Canada, to share their personal healthcare story in response to a prompt, participate in a semistructured interview and complete an online demographic survey. We used reflexive thematic analysis to gain insights into knowledge-related tensions that participants grappled with when creating their stories for clinical education.

Our findings illustrate the tensions PFP storytellers experienced regarding their identities as knowers, their lived experience as valid knowledge and acceptable ways to share their knowledge in the contexts of clinical education. PFP storytellers had to negotiate their identities as knowers, seek an epistemic space for their lived experience and balance their personal emotions with social expectations of how one should or should not feel and express emotion.

We argue that meaningful, equitable and ethical inclusion of PFPs and their stories in clinical education requires renewed understandings of and approaches to the knowledge that PFPs hold and share in clinical education.