Whole personhood in medical education: Visual thinking strategy, close reading, and creative practice with a diversity and equity lens.

Purpose: To create and implement a Whole Personhood in Medical Education curriculum including Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), close reading, and creative practice that features creative works by BIPOC, persons with disability, and/or LGBTQ + individuals that aligns with educational competencies.
Materials and Methods: Curriculum design by an interdisciplinary team made up of physician educators, medical sociologist, digital collection librarian, and art museum educators. Prospective single arm intervention study at a single site academic teaching hospital. Utilized pre-post surveys using the Interpersonal Reflexivity Index (IRI) scale on perspective taking, an internally developed ordinal scale survey on arts integration and bias recognition, and open-ended questions for qualitative analysis.
Results: A total of 161 participants responded and showed statistically significant increases in their mean scores in perspective-taking (4.7%), empathic concern (1.8%), the perceived value of art in medical education (15.8%) and recognizing bias (6.1%). In all subscales, non-white students saw bigger increases than white students, and in three of four subscales, females showed higher increases than males. Qualitative analysis of free text responses (n = 308) showed three emergent themes: (1) increased community; (2) recognition of bias in personal, interpersonal, and system levels; and (3) increased awareness of application of empathy and perspective taking in health settings.
Conclusions: Incorporating a required curriculum that features art and written narratives by minoritized groups and utilizes close observation/reading and reflective/creative practice, leads to an enhanced medical education experience. The curriculum leads to statistically significant increase in individuals' ability to identify bias, recognize perspectives different than their own, and be empathetic toward others.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:Elizabeth Lahti reports financial support was provided by Coeta and Donald Barker Foundation. Elizabeth Lahti reports financial support was provided by Tykeson Family Foundation. Lisa Abia-Smith reports financial support was provided by Coeta and Donald Barker Foundation. Lisa Abia-Smith reports financial support was provided by Tykeson Family Foundation. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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