Abstract:

Medical sciences teaching at the University level is one of the most demanding formative experiences, since the competencies students must develop to become efficient medical doctors involve communication capacities that are poorly observed in the majority of curricular programs. Medical education is yet a strongly content-based teaching process that requires students to memorize and put into practice plenty of concepts, and the practical aspects of the learning process are often mainly based in symptoms recognition, diagnosis and treatment election. Given the large volume of contents and the weight that the practical training in hospitals holds during the last years of the degree, the relationship between doctor and patients, one of the most critical aspects of health care, falls often to a secondary, almost anecdotic role. Forming more empathetic, trained in listening and communicative doctors remains thus one of the challenges of modern medical education. In this regard, the availability of elective subjects and activities that try to improve the awareness of future doctors of this social and more empathetic side of their professional careers bears a relevant potential to improve their overall performance.

From this perspective, the use of complementary lectures, discussion forums and debate groups has been used to fill in this apparent gap in medical education. During the last years, nonetheless, some initiatives have been developed that make profit of the communicative and synthetic potential of comic books and graphic narrative formats to facilitate both doctor-patient interactions and patient awareness of diseases and their consequences. This is the core idea around which the definition of the movement called Graphic Medicine has been developed, making comics more and more present in the teaching activities at the University level.

Starting from this perspective, during the last years we have been developing several comic-based activities to improve the teaching of human physiology at several Health Sciences degrees at the University of València. During the course 2021-2022 we have started a new activity based on the use of Graphic Medicine resources to boost the communication and emotional response of medicine students to be incorporated into their daily routine. We announced the creation of the Comic-book Club of Graphic Medicine to attract students from different courses of the degree in Medicine, with the aim of reading and debating around the graphic novel “Arrugas” by Paco Roca. Ten students participated in this pilot experience and were highly positive on the improvement that this reading made on their awareness of the social context and problematics of Alzheimer’s degree, although not on their scientific knowledge of the pathology itself. The activity was well-received, and students showed interest in participating in more sessions which we are currently developing, using different graphic novels that provide autobiographic experiences of their authors when facing disease and their consequences. This is, to our knowledge, the first reading club based on comics in a Faculty of Medicine in our country, and our preliminary results suggest that the use of this comic-book based resources might provide a quick, simple, and impacting way of communicating awareness of the contexts of disease and its social consequences, contributing to the development of empathetic skills in future professionals of Medicine.

Keywords:

Graphic Medicine, Comic-book Club, Medical Education, Empathetic and communicative skills.