ABSTRACT
Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a methodology designed to teach critical thinking, communication, and visual literacy. The Fine Art of Health Care is a VTS-based educational program that brings students from various health-care disciplines to the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami in Florida. Twenty-six nurse anesthesia, medical, physical therapy, nursing, and psychology students participated in the workshop during the 2016 fall semester. The students completed an anonymous survey to evaluate their experience. All participants agreed or strongly agreed that VTS helped them understand how to hone their observational and listening skills; 92% agreed that looking at and discussing art has merit with regards to collaborative practice; 96% agreed that VTS helped them improve their communication skills; and 93% found value in the VTS workshop because it provided opportunity to meet and have discussions with students from other disciplines. The arts and humanities have long been recognized as important tools for building multidisciplinary collaboration in health education. There is growing evidence that integrating the arts into the nursing curriculum can have powerful outcomes. These capabilities proved useful in the nurse anesthesia curriculum by allowing skillful conceptualization, and originality and leveling of the playing field for all health-care students.
Subject(s)
Anesthesiology/education , Art , Education, Nursing, Graduate , Thinking , Adult , Curriculum , Female , Humans , Male , Museums , Surveys and QuestionnairesABSTRACT
To assess the effectiveness of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) in medical education curricula, a pretest-posttest experimental study design was used to evaluate the impact of participating in VTS workshops on first-year medical students. A total of forty-one intervention and sixty comparative students completed the study which included the analysis of clinical images followed by a measurement of word count, length of time analyzing images, and quality of written observations of clinical images. VTS training increased the total number of words used to describe clinical images, the time spent analyzing the images, and the number of clinically relevant observations.
Subject(s)
Education, Medical , Students, Medical , Curriculum , Humans , Thinking , WritingABSTRACT
The universality of visual arts can be used to facilitate inventive and interdisciplinary approaches to open the lines of communication between learners, educators, and health care providers to improve patient outcomes. Arts-based training programs have been implemented successfully in higher education as part of a growing awareness of the need to develop interpersonal skills of health care professionals to be able to deliver respectful and compassionate patient care. Visual thinking strategies (VTS) is a student-centered methodology using facilitated art-based discussions to create inclusive discussions. VTS-based programs may be successfully developed for continuing multidisciplinary education of health care professionals with the goals of improving communication and team building. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2020;51(8):367-370.].
