What are the Humanities in Medical Education For?

Описание: Wednesday, November 06 | 12:15 to 1:15
Claude Moore Education Building, Rm 3110Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84865001458

2024 Brodie Lecture
Rebecca Volpe, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities
Director, Clinical Ethics Consultation Service, Penn State College of Medicine

The goal of this session is to explore the nature and purpose of health humanities (HH) curriculum in schools of medicine. Many – but not all—medical schools include some HH content, however the quality, quantity and nature of HH content varies widely, with some programs making masks to support professional identity formation, others visiting museums and looking at art in pursuit of visual thinking skills, and still others discussing the social construction of race and gender and the impact those long-standing values have on the modern practice of medicine. It thus seems that when programs operationalize the HH in medical student curriculum, there does not appear to be any consensus whatsoever about why we’re teaching the HH – what is our goal.
Rebecca Volpe, PhD, HEC-C, is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at Penn State College of Medicine, and Director of the Clinical Ethics Consult Service in the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. She obtained her doctorate from Saint Louis University’s Center for Health Care Ethics and completed a clinical ethics fellowship at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Since joining Penn State in 2010, she has designed and led many courses related to bioethics and health humanities, served on College and Department curriculum oversight committees, and been the recipient of numerous teaching awards. In addition to her teaching and clinical responsibilities, Dr. Volpe maintains an active research agenda. Her empirical research is currently primarily focused on medical education, in particular on the outcomes of health humanities curriculum at schools of medicine. Other areas of current or recent inquiry include an exploration of the experience of professional identity formation for underrepresented in medicine students; defining quality standards for a clinical ethics consultation (as opposed to quality for a clinical ethics consultant); and a theoretical exploration of the purpose of sabbatical – is it for research productivity or rejuvenation, and can it be both? She lives in idyllic Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, with her husband, two children, a dog named Zealand (named by her geography-obsessed tween) and a cat named Chicken Nugget (named by her chicken nugget-obsessed preschooler).