Curricular design that addresses residency physician competencies in communication skills and professionalism remains a challenge. Graphic Medicine uses comics, a medium combining text and images, to communicate healthcare concepts. Narrative Medicine, in undergraduate medical education, has limited reported usage in Graduate Medical Education. Given the time constraints and intensity of GME, we hypothesized that comics as a form of narrative medicine would be an efficient medium to engage residents.The authors created a novel curriculum to promote effective communication and professionalism, focusing (...) on empathy, compassion and cultural competency. A four-week curriculum was delivered in a neurology residency program. Excerpts from non-fiction graphic memoirs about neurological conditions were read, discussed, and paired with prompt-driven drawing exercises. Qualitative surveys were used to assess acceptability of comics, usefulness of comics to convey patient illness experience, and perception of patient needs for physician-patient communication.Ninety-seven percent of residents reported the sessions were a good use of their time. Residents identified new symptoms of neurologic disorders, articulated patient communication needs, and expressed increased empathy after participation. Residents participated in drawing exercises, but these were not formally analyzed. Graphic medicine is a well received format that may build communication skills and increase empathy. (shrink)

Innovation in ethics pedagogy has continued to evolve and incorporate other forms of storytelling aimed at improving student engagement and learning. The use of bioethics narratives in feature-length films, medical television shows, or short clips in the classroom has a well-established history. In parallel, screenplays present an opportunity for an active approach to ethical engagement. We argue that screenplays and screenwriting provide a rich supplement to current medical ethics teaching and serve as a strong form of reflective learning.

As medical ethics and professionalism education continues to equip medical students and residents with long-lasting tools, educators should continue to supplement proven teaching strategies with engaging, relatable, and generationally appropriate didactic supplements. However, popular teaching aids have recently been criticized in the literature and summative information on alternatives is absent. The purpose of this review is to evaluate and assess the functional use and application of short form audiovisual didactic supplements or "icebreakers" in medical ethics and professionalism teaching. A systematic (...) review of both the medical and humanities literature (i.e., PubMed/medline, Cochrane Library, and JSTOR) was conducted from inception to August 1, 2019. Final articles were subjected to a qualitative appraisal and thematic analysis. Thirteen articles were included for final analysis. Sixty-nine percent (n = 9) of the studies were published after 2000. Two studies were qualitative, one study was quantitative, and the remaining articles were commentaries. Short form audiovisual media was most popular outside of the United States (n = 10). Sixty-nine percent (n = 9) of articles advocated for self-contained media in the form of trigger films or short films/videos, while the remaining articles (n = 4) discussed the use of TV/film clips. Producibility of media was exclusive to short/trigger films. Nine themes were identified in the content analysis: adaptability, conversation catalyst, effective, engaging, nuance, practice, producibility, real, and subject diversity. The three most common themes in descending order of frequency were: conversation catalyst, realness, and adaptability. Trigger films represent an effective and unique pedagogical strategy in supplementing current medical ethics and professionalism teaching at the medical school level. (shrink)

A patient arrives in the emergency room apparently in a comatose state. But is he really unconscious or just faking? The young doctors on duty are skeptical. Failing to get a reaction with a chest rub, they try a variety of methods that become increasingly sadistic—pressing on the patient's fingernail with a ballpoint pen, spraying his testicles with a skin‐freezing compound, announcing an imminent eye injection to scare the patient awake.I first encountered those chilling pen‐and‐ink images in a 2012 comic (...) book, Disrepute, authored by Thom Ferrier, the nom de plume for British general practitioner Ian Williams. Disrepute is part of a young but growing genre that Williams helped dub "graphic medicine" when he founded a website by that name in 2007. Using the graphic novel form, doctors, nurses, and patients are producing accounts that often reveal the dark underbelly of the world of medicine. From patients and their families, these include portraits of imperious and insensitive physicians or nurses; from doctors, explorations of the doubt that racks them when their treatment ends in a mistake or a patient's death. While the form is also referred to as “comics,” the work, as in Williams's strip, is bleak just as often as it is humorous. (shrink)