Centering Patients, Revealing Structures: The Health Humanities Portrait Approach
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Centering Patients, Revealing Structures: The Health Humanities Portrait Approach Sandy Sufian 1 & Michael Blackie 2 & Joanna Michel 3 & Rebecca Garden 4 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
This paper introduces an innovative curricular approach—the Health Humanities Portrait Approach (Portrait Approach)—and its pedagogical tool—the Health Humanities Portrait (HHP). Both enable health professions learners to examine pressing social issues that shape, and are shaped by, experiences of health and illness. The Portrait Approach is grounded in a set of “critical portraiture” principles that foster humanities-driven analytical skills. The HHP’s architecture is distinctively framed around a pressing social theme and utilizes a first-person narrative and scholarship to explore how the dimensions of the personal and the structural are mutually constituted. We argue that when creator-educators adopt the Portrait Approach and its critical portraiture principles to design and teach the HHP, they enable learners to become proficient in synthesizing and analyzing— with both depth and breadth—the human and social dimensions of patients’ lives. This inventive curricular intervention provides a needed contribution to health professions education in that it utilizes health humanities methodologies to elucidate the multiple aspects of health, illness, disability, and healthcare. Keywords Health humanities . Health professions . Curriculum . Critical portraiture
* Sandy Sufian [email protected]
1
Department of Medical Education and Department of Disability and Human Development, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60612, USA
2
Department of Medical Education, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60612, USA
3
Urban Medicine Program and Department of Medical Education, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60612, USA
4
Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY 13210, USA
Journal of Medical Humanities
Introduction Health professions training that focuses on interactions with, and knowledge about, patients is largely based on case studies that address the clinical aspects of a patient’s medical problem (Downer and Swindells 2003; Lo 2013; Neistadt and Smith 1997). Intended to assess trainees’ clinical reasoning skills and to develop “knowledge of how diagnostic and management plans are derived,”1 these cases are typically constructed around a specific disease, symptom, or ethical dilemma and tend to gloss over the patient’s illness experience. When these cases consider the social aspects of a patient’s problems, they commonly function as a means to develop empathy, rather than to build critical thinking skills about the myriad of social, economic, political, interpersonal, and cultural forces affecting a patient’s life. In this article, we provide an innovative curricular intervention called the Health Humanities Portrait Approach (hereafter Portrait Approach), developed by health humanities scholar
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