Mekaleya Tilahun, Tianyi Zhang, Cynthia Perlis, Sam Brondfield
{"title":"Corresponding about Death: Analyzing Letters Exchanged between Patients with Cancer and Medical Students.","authors":"Mekaleya Tilahun, Tianyi Zhang, Cynthia Perlis, Sam Brondfield","doi":"10.1007/s10912-023-09785-2","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Medical students lack opportunities to have authentic conversations with patients with cancer in busy hospitals. An improved understanding of what such communication might look like may provide a framework for end-of-life curricula. The authors performed thematic analysis using written correspondence between patient and student participants in the University of California, San Francisco's Firefly Program whose letters discussed death or dying. Four themes emerged: (1) turmoil, (2) grief, (3) making peace, and (4) past, present, and future. Medical students expressed a fifth theme: unmet student expectations. The study provides educators with a unique perspective to help inform curriculum development and patient care.</p>","PeriodicalId":45518,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Medical Humanities","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09785-2","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2023/2/16 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Medical students lack opportunities to have authentic conversations with patients with cancer in busy hospitals. An improved understanding of what such communication might look like may provide a framework for end-of-life curricula. The authors performed thematic analysis using written correspondence between patient and student participants in the University of California, San Francisco's Firefly Program whose letters discussed death or dying. Four themes emerged: (1) turmoil, (2) grief, (3) making peace, and (4) past, present, and future. Medical students expressed a fifth theme: unmet student expectations. The study provides educators with a unique perspective to help inform curriculum development and patient care.
期刊介绍:
Journal of Medical Humanities publishes original papers that reflect its enlarged focus on interdisciplinary inquiry in medicine and medical education. Such inquiry can emerge in the following ways: (1) from the medical humanities, which includes literature, history, philosophy, and bioethics as well as those areas of the social and behavioral sciences that have strong humanistic traditions; (2) from cultural studies, a multidisciplinary activity involving the humanities; women''s, African-American, and other critical studies; media studies and popular culture; and sociology and anthropology, which can be used to examine medical institutions, practice and education with a special focus on relations of power; and (3) from pedagogical perspectives that elucidate what and how knowledge is made and valued in medicine, how that knowledge is expressed and transmitted, and the ideological basis of medical education.