Humanities researchers, in collaboration with medical school colleagues, have made a successful bid to the Wellcome Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF) to promote the teaching of medical humanities. The ISSF have awarded funding for a two-year project to develop a 16-week medical humanities block to the fifth year of Oxford’s undergraduate medical curriculum. The course will be taught as part of a unit covering clinical neurosciences and psychiatry, as well as teaching on pain and palliative care.
The project builds on the Advancing Medical Professionalism report, co-authored by Oxford’s Professor Joshua Hordern and Dr Jude Tweedie and Professor Dame Jane Dacre of the RCP, which advocated the importance of medical humanities in the training and education of doctors, particularly in relation to their roles as learners and innovators. The new course will enable students to use history, literature, art and artefacts to explore clinical issues, broadening their perspectives and understanding, and strengthening skills such as communication, empathy and observation. A Healthcare and Humanities Research Fellow has now been recruited to work on developing the curriculum with clinical teachers from the medical school and will start work in autumn 2019.
