Assessing the Impact of a Medical Humanities Program in a Large Internal Medicine Residency Program

It is hypothesized that a medical humanities curriculum in medical training may professionally enhance valuable professional clinical skills and personally improve physician wellness. Few studies have been performed to validate these claims in practice. To evaluate the efficacy and impact of the Humanistic Curriculum (HC) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) internal medicine (IM) residency program in Boston, MA, we surveyed first-year and preliminary residents (interns). We designed a 14-question survey (N=23), assessing students in two areas: (1) general biographical and personal education and (2) humanities curriculum experience. Based on data collected, 69.6% of interns took humanities seminars in their undergraduate medical education, and 95.7% still reported that the residency program “Positively” or “Very positively” impacted their perspective of medical practice and personal wellbeing. Nonetheless, 35% of the students who participated in the Night at the MFA program did not recall the intention they made. Likewise, 55% of participants said that their success in implementing their intention was Neutral (40%), Bad (10%), or Very Bad (5%). I suggest two forms of research-based improvement for the residency course: an additional study of goal achievement using implementation intentions and the adoption of a text-message reminder system. Both will help facilitate incorporating the goals of the HC into students’ practice, providing an implementation framework and weekly reminders. Following the mobilization of these two changes, a follow-up study could be performed to analyze the impact of these new variables.