Health Humanities in the Art Museum: multiple cohorts from MDHS in interdisciplinary training contexts over multiple years
Since 2012, Museums & Collections have been delivering bespoke health humanities programs with academics and students across Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, utilizing the University’s Art Collections and Art Museums. Sessions typically include whole cohorts, experiencing small group training in supported intensive sessions over the course of a year. Inter-professional cohort experiences are also common.
Most engagements of this type occur on campus in the Ian Potter Museum of Art, but sessions can also be delivered on site in clinical spaces, or rural teaching environments through local arts venues such as the Shepparton Art Museum and Ballarat Art Gallery.
The museum sessions are designed for MDHS students to think about the importance of a diagnosis that is not just based on physical symptoms, but also on the larger narrative that informs a patient’s health story. The aim is for students to increase awareness of their emotional reactions to ethical issues, through looking at art, and enhance their capacity to recognise the moral dimensions of clinical experiences. Students also have focused opportunity to improve their observational and descriptive skills, utilizing the unfamiliar and stimulating context of the visual and sculptural arts. Most healthcare students entering the gallery are already out of their comfort zones and in a state of alert curiosity. Their experience there, and particularly the diversity of perspectives that emerge in group conversations, demonstrates that you can have different interpretations of the same thing, without either of those positions being “wrong”. See overview: https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-can-looking-at-art-make-for-better-doctors-70484
The effectiveness of the museum sessions has been explored through a number of reviews and outcomes published as collaborative papers authored by Museums & Collections Academic Engagement and MDHS academics. You can access this information here.