Humanities for medical students: essential to their cultural competence and patient-engaged practices of care

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Over the past 50 years, advances in medical technology have revolutionised the medical landscape. The ways in which patients, their families, and health professionals connect and interact together in the medical endeavour have also changed. At the same time as advances in medical technology resulted in tremendous gains for society, criticism began emerging that the patient as a whole person had been overshadowed by the disease the person had. The interface of medicine and the humanities concerns itself with our relationships with others, the ways in which we confront challenges to our mortality, how we understand human behaviour, and the meanings we give to situations within the medical context. In this paper we outline the genesis of a medical humanities programme at the University of Auckland, and how the programme has advanced over the past twenty years. The programme promotes important social aspects of medicine such as cultural competence and person-centred engaged care. It also encourages students to improve their academic and reflective writing skills. We discuss how one course within the programme promotes student cultural awareness of - and responsiveness to - Maori people and Deaf people. Specific attention is paid to current leading pedagogy, as well as how the use of space and language contribute to student learning. We conclude that medical humanities remains an essential and valued element in medical curricula.