Brief Exercise in Narrative Medicine for Preclinical Medical and Premedical Students: MY STORY

As part of a 3-week summer regional medical school campus rural immersion experience, preclinical medical and pre-medical students accompanied a rural Family Medicine residency inpatient team on bedside rounds. One theme of the summer program is the value of empathy and the importance of truly understanding what it is like to “walk a mile in the patient’s shoes.” A previously established brief narrative exercise was modified so that the learner spent an hour facilitating a hospitalized patient’s recall of their life and then produced a short summary that was edited by the patient and then provided to the team. The senior resident chose the patient for the exercise and introduced the student, who remained when the team left the bedside. The response from the patients was uniformly positive, and in an anonymous written evaluation, eight of 11 students completing the project rated it as positive, with 3 neutral, and none negative. Four gave it the highest rating possible in terms of meeting the goals of the program.