A collaborative project on medical anthropology education for health professionals

Keywords

medical anthropology,education,health professionals

Objectives

As the aging population increases due to the low birth rate, the sophistication and specialization in medical treatment advances, and patients’ awareness of their own rights changes, healthcare and welfare services are facing issues too complicated to address by individual disciplines in healthcare and welfare studies, such as issues of insufficient communication between healthcare professionals and clients or among interprofessionals. For healthcare professionals facing such issues every day, the viewpoint to understand phenomenon in the sociocultural context and apply knowledge of medical anthropology for understanding others and relativizing oneself is highly effective and there is potential demand for such medical anthropology from the persons in charge of educating healthcare professionals. There is also a move in which 80 universities will be evaluated for certification nationwide in five years for the assurance of the international educational quality in medical education, and the standards for such evaluation refer to medical anthropology, too. In this situation, it is important to discuss education of medical anthropology targeted at Japanese healthcare professionals. Therefore, this joint research aims to review, in cooperation with professionals from plural occupations, how to develop education of medical anthropology targeted at healthcare professionals, and also aims to develop educational materials for them.

Research Results

This inter-university research project and related activities revealed mainly the following three points. The first is that, with the expansion of the field of “care in local communities” due to the increasing aged population and changes in disease patterns, the kind of anthropological education needed for health professionals is that of cultural anthropology, not only medical anthropology. The second is that it is important for health professionals to acquire the viewpoint and attitude of relativizing biomedicine by considering phenomena in a socio-cultural context rather than to learn specific concepts and theories. The third is that it is more effective in the education for health professionals to start from cases in the medical setting than from anthropological concepts, and connect those to anthropological perspectives and ideas.
The above-mentioned third point was clarified at the Collaborative Clinical Case Conferences, which was held concurrently with this research project with the cooperation of many of the project’s researchers. The workshop consisted of a medical student or a doctor presenting a case that was difficult to understand and to address with biomedicine in the clinical setting, which were then discussed among participants including anthropologists. It was held a total of 17 times at medical schools, meetings of the Japan Primary Care Association, and hospitals, with the cooperation of health professionals and anthropologists. We found that the Collaborative Clinical Case Conferences could be a model for anthropological education for health professionals.
In the second year of the project, there was a landmark occurrence—the incorporation of anthropology and sociology into the Model Core Curriculum for Medical Education in Japan, which specifies the minimum components that medical students in Japan required to learn before they graduate with a medical school degree. Initially, the research project considered education for a variety of health professional occupations, but after the change in core curriculum, starting the third year we narrowed our focus down to developing teaching materials for medical students (and medical doctors). However, considering education for not only medical doctors but also other occupations such as nurses, physical therapists, and occupational therapists in the first half of the project was still meaningful in terms of relativizing medical education and also in terms of considering anthropological education in the context of interprofessional collaboration emphasized in today’s medical setting.