Health Care Professionals’ Journeys of Caring Through Portraiture

Metropolitan Community College, a comprehensive multicampus academic institution in Omaha, Nebraska, installed portraits by the third author (MG) in the Health Careers Building and integrated them into an associate degree nursing curriculum. One goal was to expose nursing students to patients’ stories in ways that encourage them to look beyond pain rating scales and protocols to the many dimensions of patients as human beings. Using portraiture in this way could be applied to any health professions curriculum, as the intersections of humanities and health care prompted students and clinicians to look beyond science and into the emotional journeys of caring