Tanya Kane

ABSTRACT

A culturally competent approach to teach humanities in international medical school: potential frameworks and lessons learned 

Suhad Daher-Nashif

College of Medicine-Qatar University

Tanya Kayne

College of Medicine-Qatar University

Background: This paper describes the development of a culturally competent medical humanities course for second and third-year medical students at the ethnically diverse College of xxx. First taught in 2016, the elective seminar “Medicine and the Arts” was restructured in 2017 to cultivate an appreciation of the symbiotic relationship between medicine, art, and humanities, and to foster cultural competence among the students.
Methods: Results and tips are based on our experiences and past reports.
Results: In designing a course for students immersed in an Arab-Muslim context, we encountered two challenges: the discipline’s privileging of a predominantly Western canon of arts and humanities, and the largely Euro-American-centric and unilateral framing of concepts e.g., the doctor-patient relationship, patient-centered approach, patient experiences, and meanings of health and illness. To circumvent these challenges, we followed the Purnell Model for Cultural Competence, adopted the interdisciplinary approach, and employed an intersectionality framework to build and deliver a culturally competent course exploring the nexus of arts, humanities, and medicine.
In addition to these tips on which frameworks to adopt and how to structure the course, we recommend a visual literacy workshop to help them develop the ability to recognize and understand ideas conveyed through art. Furthermore, we recommend deep conversations about artistic portrayals of medicine from different cultural contexts as tools for developing cultural awareness. Lastly, we recommend that these discussions adopt a student-centered approach, where students inform about their experiences and their own health and illness determinants, in order to develop their knowledge and practice of holism and patient centered approach, and other issues related to humanities and social sciences.     
Conclusions: Adopting and implementing a culturally competent approach to medical education, alongside interdisciplinary and intersectionality concepts, are potential conceptual frameworks to structure a course that uses art works to inform about the link between humanities, social sciences and medical care.

BIO

Dr. Tanya Kane, MSc, PhD (Social Anthropology) is an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the College of Medicine at the University of Qatar. Her research interests include globalization of higher education, knowledge-based economies, medicine, and gender, especially in relation to countries of the Arabian Peninsula. Dr. Kane's current research is examining psychosocial dimensions of infertility in Qatar. Her previous work has focused on dementia, cultures of expertise, language in transnational education, and the universality of medicine.