Integrating humanities into undergraduate medical curricula: A narrative review exploring focus areas, pedagogical design, and evaluation strategies

Abstract

Background: Humanistic medical education is crucial, yet its implementation faces challenges due to inconsistent curricular focus, pedagogical approaches, and assessment methods. This review aims to identify key focus areas, effective pedagogical strategies, and robust evaluation methods for integrating the humanities into undergraduate medical education. Methods: A narrative review of MEDLINE publications from 2014 to 2024 was conducted, followed by a qualitative synthesis. Results: The initial search in MEDLINE identified 16 potentially relevant articles. After comprehensively reviewing the initial catchment through several analytical phases, 10 articles were considered for the final review. In addition, another 7 articles were included through citation tracking. Key focus areas identified in the review included medical ethics, cultural competency, literature and narrative medicine, compassion, bias in healthcare and social and behavioural sciences. Humanities were typically found to be integrated as electives, with student-centred teaching methods demonstrating effectiveness. While humanistic outcomes are highly valued, the strategies used to assess them remain notably complex and underdeveloped. Conclusions: This narrative review emphasises the need for standardised approaches to medical humanities, curriculum design, pedagogy, and assessment.