Actions to Bring Back Humanized Education in Medicine Schools

ABSTRACT This article is based on a dissertation written by the author, for the Master’s degree course in Health Teaching of the Universidade José do Rosário Vellano (Unifenas). The title of the work is: “Actions to bring back humanized education in medical schools: a systematic review of the literature, 2010-2016”. The article presents the results of a systematic literature review on the subject of making medical schools more humanized. The dehumanization of medicine has been largely attributed to medical schools, which have focused on scientific aspects to the detriment of theoretical topics, and those geared towards humanism. Medical schools have been impelled to revise their curricula, reinstating neglected disciplines and implementing ways of bring humanism back into medical practice. The general objective of this dissertation was to identify the actions proposed or developed by courses of medicine to bring humanization back into medical practice. The specific objectives were to identify the main attributes of humanism, and to describe the main educational interventions adopted for the development of the humanism in medical practice. To achieve these objectives, a systematic literature review was carried out on the Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature (LILACS) and PubMed databases, from 2010 to 2016, searching on articles in Portuguese and English. The searches resulted in the selection of 23 publications. The results showed that the main attribute of humanism is the empathy; that the main actions implemented by the medical schools are changes to the course curricula; and that the main educational actions implemented are changes to the curricula, exchange programs, and community outreach programs, through the inclusion of new disciplines, use of play activities, and opportunities to learn in cultural contexts different from those of the students’ origin. The work concludes that the range of measure adopted is still small, considering the large number of medical courses, and that the results of these actions require more objective analysis.