Mission
We aim to expand art-based humanities programs in healthcare education across the United States and the world. This website provides resources for individuals and institutions to develop a variety of arts-based experiences for students and clinicians tailored to their educational needs.
We are a growing community of educators leveraging the visual arts in healthcare education and generating evidence for the value of these techniques. We invite you to join this community to grow and advance the art and science of the healthcare humanities in clinical training.
We hope that this website can provide you with the knowledge and resources to incorporate art and museums into your teaching.
Why “visual arts-based education”?
The use of visual art in healthcare education has wide-reaching implications and can be considered for any stage of learner, from students to seasoned professionals.
Using the visual arts in healthcare education can help with learners’ observation skills, reflective abilities, and professional identity formation as clinicians. Art and museum spaces can be used to bring students and clinicians together – away from the hospital or clinic – to reflect on topics critical to their personal and professional identities, finding meaning and purpose as healers, identifying cognitive biases when approaching ambiguity (from a painting to a patient), evaluating the role that others’ opinions have on their own clinical interpretations, and grounding inferences on empiricism and visual evidence.
Why does arts-based education matter?
We find that engaging in this work supports skills critical to the development of a consummate clinician that are not typically found in textbooks, such as the ability to engage in reflective practice, work as a member of an interprofessional team, and observe and describe complicated phenomena closely and thoughtfully.
Healthcare education that emphasizes mimicry (such as a “see one, do one, teach one” model) and identifying concrete biomedical facts on multiple choice exams does not model the introspection, metacognition, and critical thinking necessary for clinical work. By taking learners outside of their comfort zone and immersing them in an art museum, we find that learners become aware of their own interpretive heuristics, renew their commitment to the healing professions, tolerate the ambiguity of complicated clinical situations, and deeply value the role of differing perspectives on clinical scenarios. In effect, we use art and museums as clinical simulations to model self-awareness, thoughtfulness, and teamwork in a way we think would not be possible in a traditional clinical environment.
