A Humanities Curriculum for Preparing Medical Students to Work With Dying Patients

Medical education literature lacks consensus on how to deliver and measure the efficacy of material about death and dying, a topic medical student learners identify as needing improvement. The humanities offer promising methodologies to address this need as they engage learners via emotion, narrative, and perspective-taking. As part of a research project evaluating using the humanities to teach end-of-life care, we designed a curriculum centered on small-group discussions of preassigned readings.

To detail the implementation of and evaluate student responses to a novel humanities-based elective teaching end-of-life skills to second-year medical students in the interest of broader replicability.

The authors planned the curriculum based on a needs assessment and their professional experience in humanities education. Students (n = 42) completed surveys after each session and cumulatively including Likert-scale and free-text items measuring responses to the materials and pedagogy. This analysis includes descriptive statistics and a formal qualitative analysis of written responses.

Students overwhelmingly evaluated materials and discussions as valuable for their professional development and comfort, confidence, and anxiety about working with dying patients. Qualitatively, student-identified outcomes included increased knowledge about and comfort with end-of-life care, strong emotional reactions, opportunities for self-reflection, improved emotional understanding, practical skills, and envisioned value for future careers. Course materials contributed to these outcomes through their diversity in type and perspective, and course discussions created a safe space where students could direct the conversation and learn from peers.

A humanities-based curriculum can be well-suited to educating preclinical medical students about end-of-life care.