Reflecting on Issues of End-Of-Life by Approaching Ventilator-Dependent Patients: an Interdisciplinary Educational Action Research

Educational action research is a valid strategy for medical humanity education because it may facilitate interdisciplinary teaching team building, diminish knowledge barrier, and accomplish continuous educational dialogue, reflection and revision. This project aims at, 1) establishing a platform for collaborating various teachers in both professional and general education; 2) reforming curriculum based on multiple perspectives through problem-solving; 3) incorporating the traditional role-modeling and the current dilemma approach; and, 4) inspecting the feasibility of adopting reflective writing as assessing tool for medical humanity. This research explores how Year-4 medical students approach ventilator-dependent patients through bedside observation, chart review, case presentation and mutual feedback. Issues of quality-of-life, autonomy, do-not-resuscitation, life-supporting system withdrawal, medical futility, resource limitation and allocation, and good death will be explored and discussed based on a scenario of hypoxic encephalopathy with ventilator use. Students’ reflective writing will be reviewed from five aspects (report, respond, relate, reason, reconstruct), and the link they made between clinical encounter and group discussion will also be analyzed. Scholars from various backgrounds will be invited to attend the course regularly for offering suggestions. Expert consultation will also be arranged from time to time, in case of more issues emerged during the study, such as systematic obstacles, communication mechanism, learning outcome analysis, or curriculum integration. This one-year project may push forward the teaching team towards interdisciplinary, integrate the new and the traditional models of learning, evaluate the feasibility of implementing reflective writing as assessment, promote the collaborative platform for academic dialogue, and conjoin the curriculum of liberal art and medical humanities. In so doing, our teaching objective of “cultivate humanities in medicine, and practice medicine in humanity” may possibly be fulfilled.