Since 2008, medical humanities has been included as an elective course at the medical programme at Lund University and as course elements and seminars in semesters 4, 6, 8 and 9. In my previous work-life, I remember how difficult it was to get the students to fill in course evaluations and when they did, they were often short, to the point and with focus on what could be done better next time (which is no bad thing).
With the course evaluations from the medical programme I met the opposite. Long text, filled with nothing but praise for the course leaders and what medical humanities meant for these students, most on the brink of becoming physicians. They seem to think that the elective course in medical humanities (the last course of the entire 5-year programme) is something of a “book of revelations”, and reminding them of why they wanted to be physicians in the first place.
We could just sit back and enjoy this, of course. Why alter something that clearly works well and has done over many years? Well. Imagine the research material these course evaluations make. Together with the lists of master thesis-subjects. And that feeling the students expressed in those evaluations – the feeling of deeper understanding both on themselves and their patients. Does it last over the years? Should we add/change something in the course to better correlate to the common-day-work-life the now physicians experience?
A big alumni-project started in autumn of 2022 – because we want to find the answers to the above questions (and more). Who to better tell us than our former students? As we speak, a questionnaire is hitting the e-mail-in-boxes, snail-mail-boxes and LinkedIn-messenger-boxes of hundreds of former medical students. Several of our staff are engaged in this project, which we hope also will include an alumni-meeting the autumn of 2023.
If you want to know more about our alumni-project, reach out to Christopher.Mathieu@soc.lu.se