Knowledge to Practice Series: A Lesson in Holistic Care: Crossing the Chasm between the Humanities and Medicine (22 Mar 2024)
30 April 2024
Integrating the humanities is essential for a holistic approach to patient care in today’s healthcare environment, particularly for designing health services that better meet the needs of older adults to facilitate healthy ageing. The research findings presented by GERI and its partners in the webinar covered themes like clinician empathy, moral distress in advance care planning, person-centred compassionate care in the context of caring for frail older adults with dementia, and more.
In his opening remarks, Associate Professor James Alvin Low, Knowledge Translation Lead, GERI, emphasised the importance of recognising the human element behind every medical case and touched on the concept of a holistic, person-centered approach to care, which is crucial for designing health services that better meet the needs of older adults in order to facilitate healthy ageing.
“We must know the person behind the illness before we can truly understand and manage the illness or disease behind the patient,” said Associate Professor Low.
Using the example of caring for frail seniors with dementia, Associate Professor Philip Yap, Adjunct Faculty, GERI, and Senior Consultant, Department of Geriatric Medicine, Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, provided an overview of what person-centred compassionate care entailed and how it can be measured.
GERI shared its evidence-based contributions to medical humanities through the presentation “Scaling Empathy: Developing the Singapore Clinical Empathy Scale.” Recognising the absence of appropriate tools to measure clinician empathy, the study by Research Fellow Dr Yu Chou Chuen and Biostatistician Robin Choo detailed how they are developing a multi-dimensional empathy scale for local healthcare professionals and students.
And in a study that delved into factors contributing to moral distress faced by healthcare professionals in Advance Care Planning (ACP), Dr Raymond Ng, Adjunct Faculty, GERI, and Senior Consultant and Head, Palliative and Supportive Care, Department of Integrated Care, Woodlands Health, shared useful insights for the development of future training programmes.
Another potential improvement around ACP was shared by Assistant Professor Lim Ni Eng, School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University. Through the study of approximately 40 video-recorded ACP sessions, he highlighted a few interactional junctures where the text-guided nature of ACP may conflict with the goal of fostering open dialogue and discussed how this could be addressed.
In his closing remarks, Professor Pang Weng Sun, Senior Advisor, GERI, stressed the need for linking the issues between humanities and healthcare to address the holistic needs of older individuals. “It’s very important that we do cross or try and cross this chasm,” he urged.
The KPS webinar attracted over 400 participants from the various medical and nursing schools, healthcare institutions and agencies involved in the care of older persons in acute and community care settings. It was organised in collaboration with the Chapter of Geriatricians (Academy of Medicine Singapore) and the Society for Geriatric Medicine Singapore.
Click here [PDF, 302 KB] for the full programme. A synopsis of each presentation can also be found in our KPS Webinar Brief: click here [PDF, 232 KB].
For more information about the presentations, please email us at enquiry@geri.com.sg.