Educating Medical Students’ “Hearts and Minds”: A Humanities-Informed Cultural Immersion Program in Indigenous Experiential Community Learning

Abstract

Well-documented disparities in health status persist between Indigenous and non- Indigenous people in Canada. Medical schools have a responsibility to address underlying causes of these inequities, in part by developing future physicians’ cultural humility and their capacities in cultural safety by increasing critical anti- racism knowledge and understandings about First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples. Undergraduate medical education relies heavily on, among other pedagogies, experiential learning. Moreover, a growing body of research is evidencing the value of applying humanities-informed approaches to medical education in order to produce “better doctors” (i.e., physicians who are more empathetic, compassionate, and attuned to wholistic orientations to patient wellness). The combined impact of these two approaches (experiential learning and humanities-informed pedagogies) on medical students’ development of cultural humility and capacities in cultural safety with Indigenous Peoples is unknown. This paper describes how the First Nations Community Education Program—an innovative humanities-informed Indigenous cultural immersion program—was developed and implemented as a collaborative project of the Northern Medical Program (itself the result of a partnership between the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine and the University of Northern British Columbia), the First Nations Health Authority, and Northern Health. The paper also documents impacts of the program and provides a resource for other medical education programs considering similar initiatives focused on cultural humility or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.