Tag: healthcare system

Together Well: Documenting COVID’s Impact through Storytelling

Together Well is an online collection of stories (some audio and written but most video) about experiences of COVID. This collaboration between the Relational Leadership Institute (www.relatelab.org) and the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative (nwnmcollaborative.org) was designed to “collectively make sense of the pandemic’s impact on all members of the community: nurses, social workers, patients, family members, doctors, caregivers, students, chaplains, scholars, educators, activists, and artists.” In addition, the stories were assembled in the hope that reflecting on pandemic experiences can provide a basis for change in healthcare and communities that “better center connection, relationships, and well-being.” Stories document not only hardship but also ways that the COVID crisis led teams, communities, and individuals to innovate, collaborate, and change in powerful ways that we may wish to continue as we move forward.

The 37 stories in the collection are listed on the webpage; each has a thumbnail and an image. There is also a video (the first entry in the collection) about the project. Stories are brief enough to show in a class or workshop. The videos are hosted on YouTube so it is possible to provide closed captioning and transcripts are also available.

A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain

“A Body, Undone” is a memoir by Christina Crosby, an English professor chronicling her life after a paralyzing cycling accident in 2003. A respected English professor at Wesleyan University, Crosby explores the physical and emotional pain of her disability through a critical feminist and queer thinking lens. She puts into words the experience of life in a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding, discussing how we construct a livable life in the midst of unimaginable pain. She situates her personal narrative within the broader social critiques of care labor and the financial burden of disability and injury within the current economic systems and structures in the US. The novel would be relevant to disability studies and feminist theory, but its prose that is rooted in humanity and the events of daily life function to make it accessible to a general audience . This book is a patient narrative that challenges the dominant discourse of disability, and could be relevant to discussions about disability, pain, and care and its intersections with gender, sexuality, and class.

Worlds Apart

Worlds Apart is a documentary split into four 10-15 minute sections that each focus on a different cross-cultural health experience. We delve into a Muslim man’s journey with stomach cancer when he turned down chemotherapy due to interference with daily prayer. We follow his daughter communicating with the doctor to see if there are any ways that both could be achieved. It also tells the story of a Lao woman with a hole in her heart who can receive surgery to fix it, but whose mother and grandmother are concerned that the scar will inhibit her Buddhist reincarnation. We then see a Black man waiting for a kidney transplant who searches for a nephrologist he can trust and speaks out on the disparity in waiting times for transplants between white and Black patients. Lastly, there is the story of when a Puerto Rican woman with diabetes, hypertension, asthma and depression turns to home remedies after her mother’s death, which she believes was caused by taking too much prescription medication.

This documentary showcases narratives that illuminate the limits of Western medicine and expand our ideas of how the American medical system can grow to be more inclusive, equitable, and sensitive. From the intersection between medicine and religion to institutional racism to the clash between types of medicating, Worlds Apart is an excellent resource to learn about a variety of cross-cultural healthcare topics in a person-centered manner. It would fit into more sociological classes like cultural anthropology or a world medicine class, but it could also be useful in a training course for pre-med or med students to broaden their ideas of how to individualize healthcare. It could be shown in class to prompt a discussion or assigned as homework along with a written reflection or essay assignment. View the “Facilitator’s Guide” in the Teaching Materials tab to find more specific ways to integrate it into a course. This documentary is not open access, but it can be viewed on WorldCat, which many institutions have access to.

Worlds Apart Facilitator’s Guide

This is a thorough facilitator’s guide on how to facilitate class discussions on the cross-cultural healthcare documentary Worlds Apart (a detailed summary can be found in the Search for Stories tab). In brief, Worlds Apart is a documentary split into four 10-15 minute sections that each focus on a different cross-cultural health experience, including a Muslim man’s journey with stomach cancer, a Lao woman with a hole in her heart, a Black man waiting for a kidney transplant, and a Puerto Rican woman with diabetes, hypertension, asthma and depression. This documentary showcases narratives that illuminate the limits of Western medicine and expand our ideas of how the American medical system can grow to be more inclusive, equitable, and sensitive.

The facilitator’s guide provides background on the filmmakers and their intentions. It includes suggestions for facilitators such as setting ground rules for discussion and asking students to jot down notes during the documentary. The four-part narrative-driven documentary is summarized, and then each section is broken down in great detail, so even someone who did not watch the film could understand the exact circumstances of each family and individual being featured. After each synopsis we also receive medical background information and a variety of discussion questions specifically tailored to different issues discussed in the stories. Each section has a separate “focus” also outlined, ranging from language barriers to explanatory modules to informed consent to racial/ethnic healthcare disparities to non-adherence to medications. This guide was created “to give health care professionals an engaging experience through which to explore ideas about cross-cultural issues in health care and to learn from the actual experiences of both patients and clinicians,” but could also easily be adapted to a university classroom setting to guide student discussions. The guide does not include any assignments, but any of the issues headlining the discussion topics could work well as research essay prompts.