2025 Gold Humanism Summit: The Person in Front of You

Protected: 2026 Summit Themes

The Arnold P. Gold Foundation presents its 6th annual Gold Humanism Summit: The Person in Front of You, to be held September 16-20, 2026 in Pittsburgh, PA. The Summit will convene members of the healthcare community to share best practices, strategies, and tools that are intended to improve healthcare for patients, communities, and caregivers alike, creating healthcare that is safe, trusting, and kind.

Participants will include practicing clinicians, faculty, students, and trainees from across the healthcare professions, as well as patients, families, and community members.

Primary Aims

The three primary aims of the Summit are to:

  1. promote educational initiatives
  2. share evidence-informed practical solutions, and
  3. build community among those who are enacting change in this realm.

In addition to falling under one of the above categories, content will reflect a selection of relevant areas, including artificial intelligence; connection; communication; equity and inclusion; humanities; interprofessional teamwork; mentorship; research; trust; wellbeing; and service-learning programs.

Find descriptions of the Summit categories and areas of relevance below.

Presentation Formats

Presentations will be featured as lecture-style talks, panels, workshops, posters, and roundtable discussions, each of which will offer practical solutions that reflect a humanistic approach to healthcare – defined as safe, kind, and engendering trust – and that directly impact the way that patient care is delivered. The intention is for Summit attendees to leave the event with practical action steps to take back with them.

Additionally, the Summit Art Gallery will feature select pieces, solicited from members of the healthcare community, that embody the Summit themes.

View the 2025 Art Gallery.

Categories

  • Education – Education across the lifespan of the learner, from early training in health professions education, including service-learning programs, through residency and fellowship, to later career professional development and certification initiatives. Emphasis is on training and learning.
  • Evidence-informed practical solutions – Application of validated tools and systems, innovative practices, and efforts leading to systemic or structural changes. Emphasis is on putting discoveries into practice.
  • Community building – Work that involves engaging multiple groups of people (healthcare team members, community members, organizational partners) who are working together to address needs that they define and prioritize in the delivery of trustworthy, kind, safe, and equitable healthcare. Emphasis is on collaboration and partnership to effect change.

Areas of Relevance

  • Artificial Intelligence – As AI technology evolves to take on increasingly more complex tasks within the healthcare setting, placing humanism at the center of patient interactions is imperative. Presentations will focus on practical ways to interact with technology that enhances, rather than detracts from, the clinician-patient relationship, including how to address bias, maintain empathy, and promote trust.
  • Connection – Presentations will offer practical approaches to having humanistic interactions in the healthcare setting, including between patient and clinician, between colleagues, peers, or among healthcare teams.
  • Communication – Presentations will offer practical and humanistic approaches to conveying, disseminating and documenting information in the healthcare setting, including between patient and clinician, between colleagues, peers, or among healthcare teams, between healthcare workers and the institutions they serve, between institutions and communities they serve.
  • Equity and Inclusion – Presentations will address practical approaches to creating healthcare training and clinical environments that are safe, equitable, diverse, inclusive, and free from discrimination.
  • Humanities – Presentations will demonstrate the value of humanities in healthcare education and practice, including fostering listening and observation skills, perspective-taking, self-reflection, and comfort with ambiguity, all of which are important to navigating healthcare, whether as a clinician, trainee, patient, or caregiver.
  • Interprofessional teamwork – Presentations will highlight practical approaches to delivering humanistic patient care that is a result of respectful and balanced collaboration across team members who represent diverse professional backgrounds.
  • Mentorship – Presentations will highlight programs that foster the sharing of knowledge and experience in the healthcare professional or education setting, including but not limited to group, one-to-one, peer, reverse mentoring, and pipeline development programs.
  • Research – Presentations will share data-driven research that demonstrate how a humanistic approach can lead to improved outcomes in the delivery of healthcare or in the healthcare practice or educational setting.
  • Trust – Presentations will explore themes of trust, mistrust, distrust, and misinformation and offer practical approaches to (re)building trust systemically within communities, healthcare settings, and in the healthcare system at large.
  • Wellbeing – Presentations will explore innovative ways healthcare workers and trainees can promote and sustain wellbeing, and what healthcare systems can do from the top down to address this issue. Presentations may feature initiatives being implemented at the individual, departmental, or institutional level.
  • Service-Learning Programs – Presentations will highlight programs that feature organized community service activities that meet identified community needs and are rooted in formal coursework and that reflect particular curricular concepts being taught.