Abstract
ABSTRACTThe humanities have been increasingly incorporated into medical school curricula in order to promote clinical skills and professional formation. To understand its current use, we reviewed the literature on visual arts training in medical education, including relevant qualitative and quantitative data. Common themes that emerged from this review included a focus on preclinical students; instruction promoting observation, diagnostic skills, empathy, team building, communication skills, resilience, and cultural sensitivity. Successful partnerships have involved local art museums, with sessions led primarily by art educators employing validated pedagogy such as Visual Thinking Strategies or Artful Thinking. There is evidence that structured visual arts curricula can facilitate the development of clinical observational skills, although these studies are limited in that they have been single-institution reports, short term, involved small numbers of students and often lacked controls. There is a paucity of rigorous published data demonstrating that medial student art education training promotes empathy, team building, communication skills, wellness and resilience, or cultural sensitivity. Given these concerns, recommendations are offered for fostering more robust, evidence-based approaches for using visual arts instruction in the training of medical students.
Highlights
Over the last three decades, the humanities have been increasingly incorporated into medical school curricula [1]
We focused on 11 medical schools in the USA (Table 1) whose visual arts programs/courses are well structured and expansive [16]
Analysis of the responses demonstrated that (1) visual arts alongside an integrated clinical component was necessary for improving observational skills, (2) description and interpretation are not systematically taught in other areas of the medical curriculum, and (3) that medical students felt that time for reflection was critical to their education and personal growth [25]
Summary
Over the last three decades, the humanities have been increasingly incorporated into medical school curricula [1] This is a direct response to several acknowledged deficiencies in medical student education, including a lack of intentional training in clinical observation [2–4], the continued need for experiential approaches for promoting empathy [5–7], the disproportionate emphasis on technical over relational competence [4,8–10], and the rising need to foster trainee resilience and self-care [11,12]. In this regard, instruction in the humanities has been employed within medical education to build skills of observation, reflection, and introspection, flexibility in thinking, and tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity [1]. Through analysis of the 11 programs’ syllabi, we designated five distinct ‘domains of focus,’ which allowed us to compare across institutions and systematically characterize the current scope of visual art instruction in medical education
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