A DePaul study found that art helps nursing and medical students strengthen commentary skills

Staring at a painting or sculpture might help nursing and medical students improve their commentary skills, in response to a study published within the April issue of the Journal of Nursing Education. “Observation is the key to diagnosis, and art can teach students to slow down and really look,” Craig Klugman, a bioethicist and medical anthropologist at DePaul University in Chicago and co-author of the study, said in a press release. “Art is a powerful teaching tool, and this program helped nurses and doctors become adept at observing and encouraged them to move beyond assumptions.” The study, titled “A Thousand Words: An Evaluation of an Interdisciplinary Art Education Program,” found that health professions students might be effectively taught visual commentary skills through using art. Klugman, chairwoman of the Department of Health Sciences at DePaul and co-author Diana Beckmann-Mendez, PhD, RN, FNP-BC, assistant professor of nursing on the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, taught and graded Art Rounds, a semester-long course attended by seven nursing students and 12 medical students from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. The course, held in 2012, provided future physicians who did hardly have the chance to attend classes with an interprofessional learning opportunity. According to the discharge, students met on the McNay Art Museum for 4 sessions and within the classroom for 4 sessions. To improve commentary skills, Klugman and Beckmann-Mendez taught students to make use of visual considering strategies, a way originally developed to assist preschoolers have a look at art. They asked the disciples, “What do you see? What makes you think so? What else do you see?” Each week, students used these strategies as they checked out artworks. Students also researched artworks and artists after which described them to one another, practicing their listening skills. In one session, students were shown live models with simulated skin conditions, including a rash and a removed tattoo. Students used VTS to look at these people and diagnose them. To measure their progress, Klugman and Beckmann-Mendez administered a pre- and post-test asking students to explain images of patients and artworks. According to the discharge, researchers counted words in students’ responses and coded them to measure changes in topics resembling emotions, evidence, medical language and storytelling. The researchers found that the change was significant in several areas. After completing the course, students talked less about emotions and made more medical observations. “We did not teach students art concepts and therefore drew on terminology they had already learned,” Krugman said in the discharge. “Their language has changed and become more clinical.” Overall, students used more words to explain the art and patients and increased their total variety of observations. After the course, students also told fewer personal narratives and stories and as a substitute worked to interpret images using only the evidence available to them. Klugman said it is important for clinicians to remove some of these biases during physical examinations. “A doctor may notice one thing about a patient, such as dirty hands or torn clothes, and jump to conclusions without taking a closer look,” he said in the discharge. “We have found that art can teach students to see both the bigger picture and the small details that can be easily missed.” However, the advantages that students achieved consequently of the observations weren’t accompanied by a rise in students’ empathy of their reactions. “By focusing on pure observational skills, students learned to observe rather than interpret,” Klugman said in the discharge. “As educators, we need to be mindful of how we use the arts and what we want students to take away from the experience.” According to Klugman, art is usually a versatile tool within the classroom. At DePaul, he teaches an undergraduate medical humanities course, and his class visits the DePaul Art Museum for one session to present students a taste of the VTS technique. He also explores novels, movies, and quite a lot of stories and human experiences in the humanities, working to deepen students’ connections with patients and with one another. “When people go for health care, they tend not to stay in one place,” Klugman said in the discharge. “Art museums give students an anchor in the community and a place to come back to. In addition to developing observational skills, health arts programs can provide students with a lifelong connection to the humanities.”