Patients, Peers, and Personal Identity: A Longitudinal Qualitative Study Exploring the Transformative Potential of the Arts and Humanities in Intern Training.

Purpose: Medical education initiatives incorporate arts and humanities (AHs) to foster physician competence and professionalism. However, the full potential of these initiatives is unclear. A recent conceptual framework attempts to clarify this potential but was constructed primarily from undergraduate medical education studies. To explore AH instruction in graduate medical education (GME), the authors asked: What is the potential of a longitudinal curriculum incorporating AHs for the personal and professional development of internal medicine interns throughout the intern year?

Method: From September 2021 to June 2022, 14 internal medicine interns at a large internal medical residency program participated in a longitudinal qualitative study, recording longitudinal audio-diaries (LADs) and participating in semistructured interviews. The LAD response rate was 91%, and the interview completion rate was 96%. The authors identified 3 themes that reflected shared meaning on the transformative potential of AHs: reclaiming personal sense of self, building community, and surfacing empathy. They constructed stories from 2 interns whose trajectories resonated most with AH instruction's potential for personal and professional development.

Results: Interns valued the abstract over the concrete benefits of AHs. Interns detailed valuable abstract benefits, with reclaiming sense of self, building community, and surfacing empathy apparent across time, pointing to long-term effects of AH interventions. The intern stories revealed a steady appreciation for AHs and difficulty with the practical utility of AHs midyear before a return to recognition of its value by year's end.

Conclusions: Despite varying AHs experience levels, interns consistently appreciated AH instruction. These findings extend a prior conceptual model to a GME population by highlighting AH instruction's potential for reclaiming interns' senses of self, building community, and surfacing empathy. Future curricula can leverage this ability to create meaningful connections with one's purpose, peers, and patients to maximize the potential of AH instruction for GME learners.