'You just emotionally break': understanding COVID-19 narratives through public health humanities.

News reports that feature the experiences of healthcare workers have shaped public conversations about the pandemic from its earliest days. For many, stories of the pandemic have been an introduction to the way public health emergencies intersect with cultural, social, structural, political and spiritual determinants. Such stories often feature clinicians and other providers as characters in pandemic tales of heroism, tragedy and, increasingly, frustration. Examining three common categories of provider-focused news narratives-the clinician as a uniquely vulnerable front-line worker, clinician frustration with vaccine and masking resistance, and the clinician as a hero-the authors argue that the framework of public health humanities offers useful tools to understand and potentially shift public conversation of the pandemic. Close reading of these stories illuminates frames that relate to the role of providers, responsibility for the spread of the virus and how the US health system functions in a global context. Public conversations of the pandemic are shaped by and shape news stories and have important implications for policy. Acknowledging that contemporary health humanities in all its iterations considers how non-clinical factors, such as culture, embodiment and power, impact our understanding of health, illness and healthcare delivery, the authors locate their argument amid critiques that focus on social and structural factors. They argue that it is still possible to shift our understanding of and telling of those stories towards a more population-focused frame.

Integrating Cultural Humility into the Medical Education Curriculum: Strategies for Educators.

ISSUE: The framework of cultural humility, which emphasizes curiosity and self-reflection over mastery, was identified over 20 years ago as a way to address implicit bias in health care, an important factor in health disparities. Despite growing interest from researchers and educators, as well as the urgent call to adopt these values, the foundational elements of cultural humility remain challenging to teach in medical education and have not yet been widely adopted. EVIDENCE: Health disparities persist throughout the United States among a growing population of diverse patients. The cultural humility framework undermines power imbalances by encouraging the clinician to view their patient as an expert of their own experience. This approach strengthens relationships within the community, illuminates racial and historical injustices, and contributes to equitable care. However, recent reviews have shown that humility-based principles have yet to be widely integrated into cultural curricula. Based on available evidence, this article introduces the foundational concepts of cultural humility with the aim of helping medical educators better understand and implement the principles of cultural humility into undergraduate medical education. IMPLICATIONS: Cultural humility is a powerful and feasible adjunct to help student physicians cultivate effective tools to provide the best patient care possible to an increasingly diverse patient population. However, there is little known about how best to implement the principles of cultural humility into existing undergraduate medical education curricula. The analyses and strategies presented provide educators with the background, instructional and curricular methods to enable learners to cultivate cultural humility. Future systematic research will need to focus on investigating design, implementation and impact.

Constructing and influencing perceived authenticity in science communication: Experimenting with narrative.

This study develops a measure of perceived authenticity in science communication and then explores communication strategies to improve the perceived authenticity of a scientific message. The findings are consistent with literature around trust and credibility, but indicate that authenticity-the perception that the scientist is a unique individual with qualities beyond institutional affiliations or a role in the production of the research-may add a potentially important dimension to accepted categories of integrity and benevolence.

Power and Language in Medical Education.

As medical educators, we aspire to teach the physicians of tomorrow the importance of considering a patient's social, environmental, historical, and cultural context when caring for them. In this paper, we posit that the language we use to communicate concepts and to describe patients and communities can have profound implications. Linguistic forms such as labels, metaphors, and descriptors can lead to disparities in care and reinforce systemic and structural inequities. At the same time, medical educators are challenged by changing language and contexts. The mutability of language offers medical educators the chance to cultivate tolerance of ambiguity, curiosity, and attention to detail in their students. While offering examples of how language in medical education can perpetuate biases that affect patient care, this paper will emphasize how the practice of attention to language is itself critical (rather than provide a list of appropriate words).

Encouraging perspective taking: Using narrative writing to induce empathy for others engaging in negative health behaviors.

Societal expectations of self-care and responsible actions toward others may produce bias against those who engage in perceived self-harming behavior. This is especially true for health professionals, who have dedicated themselves to helping reduce the burden of illness and suffering. Research has shown that writing narratives can increase perspective taking and empathy toward other people, which may engender more positive attitudes. Two studies examined whether creating a fictional narrative about a woman who smokes cigarettes while pregnant could increase positive attitudes toward the woman who smokes and reduce the internal attributions made for her behavior. Across both experiments, the narrative writing intervention increased participants' empathy and perspective taking, evoked more positive attitudes toward a woman who smokes cigarettes while pregnant, and increased external attributions for her behavior. This work supports our hypothesis that narrative writing would be an efficacious intervention promoting attitude change toward patients who engage in unhealthy, and often contentious, behaviors. This work also suggests that narrative writing could be a useful intervention for medical professionals and policy makers leading to more informed policy or treatment recommendations, encouraging empathy for patients, and engendering a stronger consideration of how external forces can play a role in someone's seemingly irresponsible behavior.

Exploring the Use of Photo-Stories and Fiction Writing to Address HIV Stigma Among Health Professions Students.

HIV/AIDS stigma exists in healthcare and is harmful to people living with HIV (PLWH). Few anti-stigma interventions target undergraduate health professions students, although evidence supports reaching providers early in their training. We developed two different arts-based interventions based on Intergroup Contact Theory: a Photovoice intervention in which they viewed photo-stories of PLWH and a fiction writing intervention in which they developed characters with HIV. We present the results of a qualitative analysis of the post-intervention interviews, to elaborate on what and how students learned from both interventions. Via theme analysis, we identified three similar patterns among both sets of intervention participants. Interventions helped students to understand PLWH as "people first," experience emotional responses to PLWH, and complicated their understanding of who was living with HIV. All three themes illustrate how Photovoice and fiction writing interrupted stereotypes about PLWH and humanized PLWH to health professions students.

What Pauline Doesn't Know: Using Guided Fiction Writing to Educate Health Professionals about Cultural Competence.

Research linking reading literary fiction to empathy supports health humanities programs in which reflective writing accompanies close readings of texts, both to explore principles of storytelling (narrative arc and concrete language) and to promote an examination of biases in care. Little attention has been paid to the possible contribution of guided fiction-writing in health humanities curricula toward enhancing cultural competence among health professionals, both clinical and community-based. Through an analysis of the short story "Pie Dance" by Molly Giles, juxtaposed with descriptions of specific writing exercises, this paper explains how the demands of writing fiction promote cultural competency.

Emotional Life: Exploring Contradictions in Health Behavior Through Creative Writing in Public Health Education.

Weaving personal experience with literature on social determinants and health humanities, the author argues that including art and literature in public health education will benefit efforts to integrate health care and public health by reminding practitioners that communities are composed of individuals with complicated and often contradictory impulses. She argues that those whose work involves planning interventions and reviewing population data also need to perform the tasks of mental flexibility, of imagination, to think about the people behind the numbers. Together with colleagues at the University of Missouri, the author researches the role of creative writing and imagination in reducing HIV stigma and finds hopeful signs in student responses that they are prepared to consider the contradictions present in human behavior if they are given the opportunity to reflect deeply upon them. Creative writing, literature, and art belong in public health education, she argues, because that is how we make space for emotion in our lives and how we connect with the emotional lives of others.

'Only connect': the case for public health humanities.

Humanities in health has until now been primarily understood to mean humanities in medicine and has generally failed to include public health. I will argue in this paper that the common justifications for the former--including increased empathy among practitioners--are at least as applicable, if not more, to the latter. Growing emphasis on the social determinants of health and cultural competency in public health require public health students and professionals to develop a nuanced understanding of the influence of social context on health behaviour and to empathise with people in difficult circumstances. Literary fiction has been demonstrated to have an impact on skills related to empathy and social intelligence. Further, translating epidemiological evidence into public policy is a core task of public health and there is a growing body of research to indicate that statistical evidence is more persuasive when combined with narrative evidence. In this article I explore similarities and differences between proposed humanities in public health and programmes in humanities in medicine and highlight research gaps and possible implications of a more expansive view of humanities in health.

Dancing through Cape Coast: ethical and practical considerations for health-related service-learning programs.

Short-term service-learning programs that focus on global health are expanding rapidly, spurred by students' desire to be of service in a world that has been made to seem small by new technology and universities' willingness to embrace the goal of educating global citizens. In this commentary, the author uses experiences from a recent trip she led to Ghana as a backdrop against which to explore some of the ethical and practical issues that arise when U.S. students work in health-related programs in developing countries. At minimum, the author argues, these programs should lead students to consider issues such as which basic services people are entitled to, regardless of where and in what circumstances they live, and how differences in access to social and economic resources contribute to health disparities on a global scale. She also suggests that sponsoring institutions should consider what is owed to the countries and communities in which their students learn. Finally, she underscores the circumstances under which service-learning programs can truly benefit the cause of global health.