Reflective writing and medical humanities: some pedagogical remarks

Literature has shown increasing interest on reflective writing as a strategy that can enhance communication skills, empathy and overall professionalism in healthcare professionals in general and in medical doctors in particular. These aspects are considered pivotal goals in medical humanities courses/electives. Reflection is considered a deliberate and conscious activity allowing the individual to contemplate is/her/others\u2019 behaviour and events, and responses to them. Reflection is about cogitating one\u2019s own lived experience of thinking, which includes not only thoughts but also ideas, representations, prejudices, emotions, and values. Writing an experience, instead of imply telling about it, allows the writer to put on the paper what he/she could reflect upon. This allows to take a distance from an experience and to analyse it in a deeper and more comprehensive manner. While mandatory reflection is growing in education and reflective accounts are re-viewed and marked in some universities, there has been a general concern that \u201cthe requirement for reflection has distorted the original intentions of meaningful reflective practice\u201d. In this paper I will discuss the role of reflection in learning from clinical practice, with a particular focus on undergraduate medical education. I will attempt to explain why writing is intended as a core strategy for developing meaningful learning from one\u2019s own experience. I will then illustrate general features of reflective writing in undergraduate medical education and report some writing prompts. Finally, I will convey some medical students\u2019 reactions to those activities and results of reflective writing experiences, as reported by the literature, concluding with some pedagogical remarks