On February 20th, a special issue of Medical Education dedicated to humanism in healthcare was released as a result of a partnership between the Arnold P. Gold Foundation and the AMS Phoenix Project. Both organizations work to support healthcare trainees and professionals in delivering compassionate care.
The special issue was co-guest edited by Elizabeth Gaufberg, MD MPH, the Director of the Gold Foundation Research Institute, and Brian Hodges, MD PhD, Project Lead for the AMS Phoenix Project. The issue features work by several authors from the Gold Foundation’s Mapping the Landscape, Journeying Together (MTL) initiative which supports research teams in synthesizing what is known and identifying gaps in our knowledge about humanism in healthcare. Our ultimate goal is to fill gaps with new research and use findings to advocate for change.
This special issue contains four literature reviews from MTL teams lead by authors Virginia Cowen, Silke Dennhardt, Paul Haidet, and Sandra Sulzer. It also includes commentary from MTL community members Eric Holmboe, Elizabeth Gaufberg and Brian Hodges, Tina Martimianakis and Fred Hafferty, and Martina Kelly and Tim Dornan, among others.
Other MTL teams have explored such topics as responding to suffering, assessing empathy development, and promoting humanistic role modeling. Their manuscripts have been submitted to a variety of peer-reviewed journals and several have been published. We look forward to the publication of more research supported by our “Mapping the Landscape” initiative along with the changes that will come as a result of research-based advocacy for humanism in healthcare.
