Integrating patient stories into education for medical doctors

Making the processes of creating online medical education more inclusive, experiential, and patient-centred.

Background:

I am an instructional designer at the University of British Columbia’s division of Continuing Professional Development (UBC CPD). The design team creates online courses for medical doctors, midwives, and other healthcare professionals.

The role of an instructional designer is a mix of content, visual and user experience design. We take content from a team of medical experts and make it more learnable, interactive, and engaging. The content given by experts includes patient case studies.

This is an example of how patient case studies are presented on the UBC CPD eLearning site.

The case studies present a believable patient circumstance and ask the learner what they would do in that situation. The learner can then apply the information learned throughout the course. In our current process of creating medical education and case studies, patients are not involved.

Why is this problem space important?

As medical educators and instructional designers, we are putting faces and names to case studies that medical experts write. Our content can affect how our learners interact with real patients.

These are examples of images created for an online breastfeeding course. I created these illustrations before studying this topic, and will discuss my critique of them in another post! Stay tuned.

Some of our courses highlight populations historically marginalized by society and/or medical research. Placing a spotlight on them emphasizes their need for specialized care or consideration and understanding from their healthcare provider. Therefore, it is important that we think critically about our own practices, and how we represent patients.

Research and design questions:

For my grad project at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, I am exploring this problem space and will engage with the following questions:

1. How might we engage with our learners to analyze our current patient case studies and use of content? Do our current patient case studies mimic patient-doctor interactions?
2. How might we ethically represent patients using imagery? Should we create images that feature diversity or ambiguity?
3. How might we embed patient stories in our education? How might involving patients’ stories shift the value and power of knowledge?
4. How might we diversify our medical expert team by incorporating patient advocacy groups and other healthcare professionals?