Journal of Medical Humanities - Call for Papers
Special Issue
The Medical Humanities Today:
Humane Health Care or Tool of Governance?
Are the medical humanities good for doctors?
Do they contribute to the creation of a more humane
health care practice and, if so, how? Are the ideals
of medical humanities compromised by evidence-based
health care systems?
Doctors' absence of humanity is a recurrent complaint
in patient satisfaction surveys. The doctor-patient
relationship is being engulfed in the prevailing trend
towards a consumer-centered culture of blame and
litigation.. The onus of patient satisfaction is
increasingly laid upon the individual healthcare
professional who risks being held liable personally in
an environment emphasizing teamwork, shared
responsibility, and patient autonomy. Medical schools
increasingly define learning outcomes in terms of
'humanistic' practice. In the UK, the General Medical
Council launched a campaign to improve undergraduate
medical education, publishing two (profoundly
different) versions of a pamphlet on Tomorrow's
Doctors, in 1993 and 2002, respectively, which argued
that doctors should acquire increased cultural
competence during their initial training. It would
certainly not seem unreasonable that patients demand a
more humane relationship with their doctors. If
medical educators are to help future doctors develop
their humanity more readily, it is plausible to apply
insights from the humanities to medical education.
Currently, the best ways of achieving these goals
remain to be worked out, and the tenets of
evidence-based practice demand that the efficacy and
cost-effectiveness of introducing medical humanities
into the core of the undergraduate curriculum be
assessed. But can established measures of efficacy and
cost-effectiveness be usefully applied to the medical
humanities - a field of scholarship which one would
assume should encourage reflection on established ways
of thinking and acting? There is a deep irony in the
contradictory demands expressed in well-meaning
programmatic statements such as the above:
patient-centeredness and autonomy versus
cost-effectiveness and rationing; demands on the
individual doctor's accountability within an ever-more
fragmented healthcare system where continuity of care
is falling off the scale of priorities. How can
demands for continuity of care, an important aspect of
humane health care, be balanced with demands that
doctors be available any time out of hours, which
creates stresses and pressures on their lives
To advance debate on such questions, the Journal of
Medical Humanities is inviting contributions to a
special issue, 'The Medical Humanities Today: Humane
Health Care or Tool of Governance?' Questions may
include
Who is demanding that others be humane?
Is the call for toleration of uncertainty used as
justification for bad organization? Does reflective
practice individualistic systemic failures,
compensating structural overwork with poetry, and so
on?
Does evidence-based practice corrupt the 'humanity' of
the medical humanities?
The collection has the potential to play a significant
role in debates about the future of the medical
humanities in both the UK and the U.S. If you wish to
discuss your proposal further, please contact
Alan Petersen [log in to unmask]
Rainer Brömer [log in to unmask]
Alan Bleakley [log in to unmask] , or
Rob Marshall [log in to unmask]
The final date of submissions is 1 June 2006. You can
also contact Therese Jones [log in to unmask] for more
information about submitting to the journal.
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