Caring for Our Patients, Our Students, Our Colleagues, Ourselves: The Power of Narrative

The power of narrative...to humanize, to heal, to transform healthcare and health policy. In a rapidly changing, increasingly technologic healthcare environment, however, how can we maintain the centrality of narrative for competent, compassionate relationship-centered healthcare? Dr. Wald will discuss how interactive (guided) reflective writing and literature deepens understanding of the patient's illness experience, preserves empathy, fosters reflective capacity, and promotes meaning-making, ideally strengthening the physician-patient relationship. Dr. Wald brings educational and experiential lenses with her medical education scholarship as well as the illness narrative turn of her life and shares excerpts of her published essays and poetry. Dr. Hedy Wald is Clinical Professor of Family Medicine, Alpert Medical School of Brown University; Faculty, Harvard Medical School Pediatrics Leadership Program, and Commissioner, Lancet Commission on Medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust. She is a Gold Humanism Foundation Harvard Macy Scholar, was a Fulbright Specialist Scholar in medical education for Ben Gurion University of Health Sciences, Israel and a Scholar-in Residence at Oxford University with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism, UK and has presented at over 120 health professions schools and healthcare organizations world-wide. Her creative writing, reviews, and poetry have appeared in literary and medical journals and her work has been featured in major news outlets. Dr. Wald has been cited on X (Twitter) as a medical educator to follow, on #WomeninMedicine Day as a "woman who lifts others up," and as a "voice of conscience and compassion."