The narratives of medicine and nursing students: The concealed curriculum and the dehumanization of health care.

Abstract

A predominantly biomedical focus attributed to teaching and practice in health sciences contributes to a dehumanization process, which is one of the main complaints of Brazil’s health system users. Any strategy that intends to address the issue depends on the presence of well-educated health professionals from both the technical and humanistic point of view. The greatest deficits concern humanistic education. The present article presents part of a larger study that aimed to investigate the effectiveness of using narratives as a didactic resource in humanistic teducation of medical and nursing students. Among the themes that emerged from the qualitative methods, emphasis goes to the concealed curriculum, which permeated all the other themes and against which students could be inoculated through exposure to a patient-centered teaching model that gives priority to ethical reflections.