The royal society of medicine open section’s medical humanities conference: Physician resilience and compassionate practice

Abstract

The RSM Open Section’s medical humanities conference held on the 5th of October set out to explore the relationships between literature, the humanities and healthcare. Clinician resilience and compassionate care were explicit themes for the day. Professor Deborah Bowman, the voice of Radio 4’s Inside Ethics Committee launched the conference by exploring the parallels between Medicine and the theatre. She examined the work of Samuel Beckett, helping the audience to consider the ‘altered state’. Beckett’s line ‘to be what I always am, so changed from what I was’ [1], highlights ‘Consistency for person’ and how we, as healthcare professionals, ask about change. Bowman drew lessons from the theatre to be applied in practice to ‘attend to the objective and subjective, to attend to the abstract not in the room and to attend to the self and other’. These wider considerations can help healthcare professionals to hold onto compassion in medical practice which sometimes can be lost through the pressures of working within systems. Professor Bowman concluded that in order to ask someone to practise in a compassionate way, like an actor in a play, clinicians need rehearsal in order to be able to give voice to values.