Message from the Chair

As I write this message in early August, I am mindful that we are now 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic. We have started the 2021-2022 academic year, masked and still largely on Zoom, awaiting the impact of the Delta variant. For a little while this spring it felt that the pandemic was lifting. The virus, apparently, had other plans.

As a child I grew up with the futuristic notion of video communication by watching “The Jetsons” and “Star Trek.” While computers and smart phones made Facetime and Skype a reality years ago, not until the pandemic did many of us communicate more online than in person. It has been a sobering, and yet creative, transition. We have met some limits (Zoom fatigue) at the same time that we have reveled in new-found connectivity. Local events suddenly became global. We “shared space” with people around the world. Our lives thus expanded even as they contracted.

Like a lot of you, I have been reading my way through the year—part escapism, part connecting to others, part trying to understand the pandemic and the racism that George Floyd’s murder illuminated. This year, the department purchased “Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do,” by Jennifer L. Eberhardt, for all incoming medical students and the facilitators in our new course, Foundations of Health Humanities (see Education Update). The book provides a balanced, well-researched, narrative account of how culture and our brains work together to perpetuate racist behavior. Our hope is that it invites conversations in and out of the classroom about how bias works and what to do about it when it surfaces in our lives.

Our experiences of the year have been uneven—some of us have suffered intense losses; some of us have schooled our children at home; some of us have developed new passions; some of us have been lonely; some of us have learned painful personal lessons. This fall, as we come back together, at least some of the time, let us celebrate being together once again—at least outside, possibly masked and perhaps only briefly

Bernice L. Hausman, PhD
Professor and Chair, Department of Humanities
Professor, Public Health Sciences, Penn State College of Medicine
Edward S. Diggs Professor Emerita, Virginia Tech

In July 2021, the College of Medicine rolled out a new Phase 1 curriculum in Health Humanities for the incoming class of first-year students. Developed over the course of academic year 2020-21, the new first-year curriculum consists of three courses: Foundations of Health Humanities, Observation and Interpretation, and Humanities in Context.

The new courses amplify students’ understanding of the cultural contexts of health care and what it means to treat patients as whole persons, offering them an opportunity to develop and practice visual thinking skills, narrative competence, critical consciousness, critical thinking, and ethical sensitivity. With a new focus on social justice and advocacy, the courses create space for acknowledging, learning about, and disrupting racism and other forms of discrimination in health care and society at large.
A team of dedicated faculty and students met weekly for a year to develop a vision and learning goals for the new curriculum.

Vision: Health Humanities is intrinsic to medical education, developing capacities to approach patients as whole persons. Health Humanities learning experiences cultivate knowledge for practice and critical engagement, focusing on content, skills, and behaviors that advance humanism in medicine and society.

Humanities Curricular Goals
• Demonstrate cultural humility
• Demonstrate critical habits of mind
• Demonstrate cognitive and affective integration
• Demonstrate professional and ethical behavior
• Communicate effectively in interpersonal encounters
• Develop a humanistic professional identity

Humanities Department Faculty Lead Penn State Health’s COVID Ethics Task Force

In the early weeks of the pandemic, health systems across the country wrestled with how to allocate scarce resources, such as deciding which patients in respiratory failure should receive ventilator support if the supply of ventilators was not sufficient.
At Penn State Health, the COVID Ethics Task Force—spearheaded by Humanities faculty—was tasked with developing how best to allocate such critical care resources in the event of scarcity. The task force was initially led by Michael Green and then Benjamin Levi, and included Rebecca Volpe, Michael Freeman, LJ Van Scoy, Scott Armen and Velma Carter-Dryer.
In addition to guidelines for the allocation of scarce resources, the group addressed whether or if the medical center could decline patient transfers from other institutions and when Penn State Health employees could be recused from interacting with COVID-infected patients, among other pressing ethical issues during the pandemic.

Motivated by the racial reckoning of summer 2020, the Doctors Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine launched the Ripple Effect Competition to support actions, programs or projects that meaningfully improve the experience of racially and ethnically diverse coworkers, patients and learners.
The following units have received Ripple Effect awards: the Child Life Program; the Simulation Center and Department of Anesthesiology; Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, Surgery, Family and Community Medicine and Medicine; and the Penn State Health Cancer Institute.
To learn more about The Kienle Center Ripple Effect Competition and other Kienle Center initiatives, visit sites.psu.edu/kienlecenter/rippleeffect or email aolivera@pennstatehealth.psu.edu.

 

Dr. Daniel George explains how financial instability, lack of infrastructure, a deteriorating sense of community and family fragmentation are contributing to diseases of despair in Pennsylvania communities.

This research was covered on WITF’s Smart Talk program and by WHTM abc27 News.

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