As I finish grading student papers for an undergraduate community health course, I am reminded of the two most influential courses in all of my undergraduate and graduate education: 1) Comparative World Religions taught by Clyde Holbrook, Oberlin College in 1980; and, 2) Water and Sanitation taught by Clive Shiff at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 1992 (in which we applied a problem-based learning/case study approach to a Zimbabwe village water and sanitation project in a team-based approach with health care providers from mostly resource-poor countries). These two courses on seemingly disparate topics were the most personally transformative for me in terms of expanding my worldview and enhancing my critical thinking skills. Those, in turn, are two of the most important educational outcomes or standards that I aim to teach to in my work educating future nurses and other health care professionals.
As a society, as a world, what do we most want and need in health care providers? Yes, of course, we want and need intelligent, highly competent providers who are up-to-date on all of the latest scientific, evidence-based practice guidelines. But robots can do that. What we really want and need are flesh-and-blood, compassionate, grounded, and questioning humans who understand at a visceral level what it means to face existential questions of life and death; what it means to face complex personal and community-level ethical issues; and what it means to wrestle with the visceral, practical questions such as how to best to take care of basic bodily functions (like pooping and peeing) and how a community can obtain safe, clean drinking water (and the complex political, cultural, social, and historical issues related to that access).
In order to have more health care providers capable of such things, in order to ‘humanize health care,’ we need to have better support of the humanities within basic primary education, undergraduate education, graduate education, and continuing education…. Ah yes, and we need to have more health care (especially nursing) educators who have meaningful exposure to, education in, and orientation towards the humanities. By humanities I mean “the study of how people process and document the human experience” (source: Stanford Humanities), which typically includes the academic disciplines of: philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history, and language/linguistics. Humanities and a ‘liberal arts’ education are foundational to our country and to democracy; they are also currently being undermined by a focus on ‘practical’ jobs-based education in STEM (non-humanities) subjects: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. As an important counterpoint to that trend, I encourage you to view the brief (7 minute) video “The Heart of the Matter” by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (to accompany their 2013 report of the same name).
Remember to ask the important questions: who are we? where did we come from? why are we here? where are we possibly going? and where is a safe place to poop?
JOSEPHINE ENSIGN 