Reclaiming care: integrating nursing humanities into Philippine nursing education

Traditional undergraduate nursing education often prioritises biomedical and technical skills, neglecting the humanistic dimensions vital for holistic practice. This abstract advocates for integrating nursing humanities, an interdisciplinary field bridging arts, humanities and social sciences with nursing, to humanise care, cultivate empathy and decolonise nursing in the Philippine context. Globally, methods like narrative medicine and arts-based learning foster critical thinking and cultural sensitivity. However, in the Philippines, humanities are marginalised in the Bachelor of Science in Nursing curriculum, a structural imbalance perpetuated by Western biomedical models and colonial legacies that undervalue interpretive knowledge. This marginalisation sidelines Filipino philosophies of care and indigenous epistemologies. This paper proposes a decolonised and culturally grounded integration of nursing humanities, specifically by incorporating local concepts like kapwa, the recognition of shared identity and interdependence, into the curriculum. A case study, demonstrating the use of patient narratives within a pharmacology course, illustrates how narrative and arts-based methods bridge theoretical knowledge with lived experience. This approach strengthens students' empathy and moral imagination, aligning scientific rigour with compassion and social consciousness. Lastly, embedding humanities prepares Filipino nurses to deliver culturally responsive, person-centred care, positioning nursing humanities as a transformative force towards a more humane and decolonised healthcare system.