SHARE

SHARE - Health and Humanities Acting Together (PTDC/LLT-OUT/29231/2017)

This project is part of the emerging movement of Medical Humanities (MH) (BH 2015) and follows the pioneering work launched in Portugal in 2009 and pursued by the FCT project N&M – Narrative & Medicine: (con)texts and practices across disciplines (2013-15), which involved international partnerships and focused on research, training, and applied work. The aim now is to consolidate research and training through interdisciplinary fieldwork that may advance knowledge in this innovative area and contribute to improve the quality of health care.
The project aims to: 1) pursue reflective work on theoretical and epistemological questions, particularly in regard to the frontiers and contiguities between MH and Narrative Medicine (NM), as well as to the place and nature of the concept of narrative when used in a clinical context and a pathographical register; 2) develop fieldwork and disseminate it; 3) strengthen and diversify the postgraduate curricular unit on NM (created in 2012) and set up the foundations for an interuniversity and inter/national doctoral program in MH; 4) facilitate the transfer of acquired knowledge to applied practices involving patients, trainers, carers, and healthcare professionals; 5) divulge the results obtained from research on a regular basis.
The project will carry out research involving patients, trainers, students, and healthcare professionals, from academia, hospitals and patients’ associations, so as to continue to experiment, examine, and assess the impact of narrative and communicative phenomena in the context of healthcare (MJC 2017). Such impact will be considered within a relational ethics (AB 2015) and by using instruments and methods derived from the humanities and social sciences (MSM 2015; RC 2010), in particular from literature and literary studies (Charon 2006; IF 2015; GD 2016). To that effect, we will resort to interdisciplinary collaboration and a multidisciplinary team (literature, philosophy, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, sociology, anthropology, and psychology) that received specific training in the previous project. We will pursue applied work in an integrated perspective, taking into account the (qualitative and quantitative) results obtained in fieldwork. These will in turn inform our concurrent reflection on the extent to which models used in other countries suit Portuguese socio-cultural and organizational reality.