Bates Seminar Series: Britt Dahlberg, PhD. "Critical Healthcare Humanities: Social Sciences and Humanities as Interventions in Healthcare Research, Training, and Practice"

Critical Healthcare Humanities: Social Sciences and Humanities as Interventions in Healthcare Research, Training, and Practice

Britt Dahlberg, PhD

Cooper Medical School
Rowan University

Now more than ever, we require skillful human-centric approaches to healthcare education, research, and practice. Headlines reiterate challenges facing U.S. healthcare: from chronic understaffing of nurses and high rates of burnout, to patient experiences of alienation, and high costs and poor outcomes. With increasing attacks on humanities and social sciences in higher education, and financialization of healthcare, it is time to explore our deeper intentions for humanistic healthcare, and develop novel approaches to making these intentions our reality. Healthcare humanities offer concrete practices to address healthcare challenges. In this talk, Britt Dahlberg, PhD, shares case studies to illustrate novel models of practice, from projects employing modes of storytelling such as Oral History, ethnography, mixed methods research, theater, and visual arts, in settings including: community engagement around environmental health; medical education; and communications training for nurses and physicians. This talk is a space to explore together the tensions facing each of us in our own fields of practice, and potential avenues forward, so that together we can draw on the strengths of our fields, and our first-hand experiences, to improve our workplace, educational, and care experiences in healthcare.