Health Humanities curriculum and evaluation in health professions education: a scoping review.
Sandra E Carr, Farah Noya, Brid Phillips, Anna Harris, Karen Scott, Claire Hooker, Nahal Mavaddat, Mary Ani-Amponsah, Daniel M Vuillermin, Steve Reid, Pamela Brett-MacLean
Author Information
Sandra E Carr: Health Professions Education, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. Sandra.Carr@uwa.edu.au.
Farah Noya: Health Professions Education, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
Brid Phillips: Health Professions Education, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
Anna Harris: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands.
Karen Scott: Medical School, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Claire Hooker: Medical School, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Nahal Mavaddat: Medical School, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
Mary Ani-Amponsah: College of Health Sciences, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana.
Daniel M Vuillermin: Institute for Medical Humanities, Peking University, Beijing, China.
Steve Reid: University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.
Pamela Brett-MacLean: Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
BACKGROUND: The articulation of learning goals, processes and outcomes related to health humanities teaching currently lacks comparability of curricula and outcomes, and requires synthesis to provide a basis for developing a curriculum and evaluation framework for health humanities teaching and learning. This scoping review sought to answer how and why the health humanities are used in health professions education. It also sought to explore how health humanities curricula are evaluated and whether the programme evaluation aligns with the desired learning outcomes. METHODS: A focused scoping review of qualitative and mixed-methods studies that included the influence of integrated health humanities curricula in pre-registration health professions education with programme evaluate of outcomes was completed. Studies of students not enrolled in a pre-registration course, with only ad-hoc health humanities learning experiences that were not assessed or evaluated were excluded. Four databases were searched (CINAHL), (ERIC), PubMed, and Medline. RESULTS: The search over a 5 year period, identified 8621 publications. Title and abstract screening, followed by full-text screening, resulted in 24 articles selected for inclusion. Learning outcomes, learning activities and evaluation data were extracted from each included publication. DISCUSSION: Reported health humanities curricula focused on developing students' capacity for perspective, reflexivity, self- reflection and person-centred approaches to communication. However, the learning outcomes were not consistently described, identifying a limited capacity to compare health humanities curricula across programmes. A set of clearly stated generic capabilities or outcomes from learning in health humanities would be a helpful next step for benchmarking, clarification and comparison of evaluation strategy.
