Art Museum-Medical School Partnerships - Transcripts of Museum Educator Interviews

The arts and humanities have longstanding ties to medical education, and their continued incorporation has been recently encouraged in the Fundamental Role of Arts and Humanities in Medical Education (FRAHME) initiative sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Clinical skills promoted by visual arts training include observation, clinical diagnosis, empathy, team building, communication, resilience, and cultural sensitivity. Partnerships between art museums and medical schools are frequently involved in medical education using art-based methods for developing these skills. Forging new museum-medical school partnerships from the ground up, however, can be challenging, with the current literature providing limited evidence-based guidance for creating such partnerships. While examples from individual schools may be useful, they do not capture the diverse perspectives of museum educators nor identify common themes across art museum-medical partnerships. To address this gap in the literature, we sought to describe the experiences and perspectives of museum educators in establishing and maintaining these museum-medical school partnerships. Using a mixed methods approach, we explored from the perspective of the museum educators, the challenges during initial development of the partnership, the keys to sustainability, and the benefits that art museum-medical school partnerships can provide to all parties involved.