A podcast to teach medical humanities at medical school: a text-mining study of students’ lived experience

Abstract

The teaching of medical humanities is increasingly being integrated into medical school curricula. We developed a podcast called Le Serment d’Augusta (Augusta’s Oath), consisting of six episodes tackling hot topics in the modern world of healthcare related to the patient-doctor relationship, professionalism, and ethics. This podcast aimed to provide scientific content in an entertaining way, while promoting debate among medical students. The Le Serment d’Augusta podcast was proposed as one of the various optional modules included in the second- to fifth-year curriculum at the School of Medicine of Sorbonne University (Paris). We asked students to report their lived experience of listening to the podcast. We then used a text-mining approach focusing on two main aspects: i) students’ perspective of the use of this educational podcast to learn about medical humanities; ii) self-reported change in their perception of and knowledge about core elements of healthcare after listening to the podcast. 478 students were included. Students were grateful for the opportunity to participate in this teaching module. They greatly enjoyed this kind of learning tool and reported that it gave them autonomy in learning. They appreciated the content as well as the format, highlighting that the topics were related to the very essence of medical practice and that the numerous testimonies were of great added value. Listening to the podcast resulted in knowledge acquisition and significant change of perspective. These findings further support the use of podcasts in medical education, especially to teach medical humanities, and their implementation in the curriculum.

Keywords

• Podcasts
• medical humanities
• data mining
• medical education
• storytelling