Next month, over 80 researchers and healthcare leaders will gather in Chicago for the third annual “Mapping the Landscape, Journeying Together” Symposium, held by the Gold Foundation Research Institute.
Mapping the Landscape, Journeying Together (MTL) is a community of practice that engages in research and advocacy to advance humanism in healthcare. Since 2013, the Research Institute has given 56 MTL grants to teams made up of over 300 people from 60 institutions.
The annual Symposium is the highlight of the Mapping the Landscape initiative. Our research teams come together to build relationships with one another, share their research findings and project work, give and receive feedback, and deepen their understanding of the field of humanism in healthcare.
We also build participants’ skills by offering workshops given by leaders in the field. This year’s workshops will offer attendees the chance to learn how to use mindfulness to make change at work; how to use and evaluate self-report instruments; how to create academic presentations based on musical constructs; and how to design better research studies.
Participants have told us the networking and learning opportunities provided by the Symposium have led to new research and change-making collaborations as well as a renewed sense of purpose. For many attendees, the ability to collaborate with other like-minded individuals helps foster important dialogue needed to produce humanistic changes within their own institutions such as implementing new curricula and trainings designed to support a humanistic culture and validating humanism assessment tools. In the words of one participant, the symposium creates “a wonderful sense of community and a safe environment for curiosity and learning, relationship-building.”
