Healer – Exploration of Service, Relationships, Compassion, and Empathy

1. Mohamud A. Verjee, BSc (Hons), MBChB, DRCOG, CCFP, FCFP

1. Medical Education

1. WCM-Q

1. Interview w/ Sponsor

Description of Elective:

Title of Elective (Non-Clinical) – “Healer – Exploration of service, relationships, compassion, and empathy.”

Main Objectives:

1. To recognize the values of medical service
2. To describe healing relationships when dealing with illness in patients
3. To discover the reverence for life and compassionate care
4. To appreciate the power and impact of empathy
5. To appraise and strengthen the altruistic values in a medical career
6. To collect the intentions to serve that have led to the choice of a medical career

This elective will cover listening, acceptance of illness, dealing with loss of life, grief, healing, altruism, encounters with awe and mystery and self-care practices. Students will be able to uncover and strengthen their altruistic values, sense of calling and intention to serve that have led them to medicine, consolidating a firm foundation for meeting the challenges of contemporary medical training and practice. Art, poetry, narrative medicine, and music will be discussed for coping skills, and to fill gaps in aspects of learning that enables students to make medical practice uniquely their own. “Free will,” and links to neuroscience will be discussed. Students should be enabled to discover and recognize their personal understanding and the universal meaning of the practice of medicine.

Additional Goals:
This elective seeks to:
Enable students to experience professional relationships that are nonjudgmental, noncompetitive and harmless, that offer a unique professional support system within a healing community.
Recognize the need for self-care in order to provide good patient care and avoid burnout.
Recognize grief as a self-care strategy for training physicians, and identify strategies and tools of grieving.
Recognize that there are losses that cannot be fixed.
Recognize the presence of mystery and awe in the practice of medicine.
Formulate a personal commitment to medicine and make that commitment visible among peers.
Recognize that who they are is as important to their patients as what they know.
Gain skill in the dissemination of innovative ideas.
Experience sharing the values of the Hippocratic Oath: compassion, service, harmlessness, reverence for life and covenant at various levels of training.

A final student evaluation is based on the submission of a narrative article, of about 1500 words on the challenging demands of contemporary medical training and practice. Discussion board topics will be posted twice weekly, to be completed on a time limited basis. Full attendance at all instruction sessions is required.