Gazing at a painting or examining a sculpture can assist nursing and medical students improve their ascertainment skills, according to a study published in the April issue of the Journal of Nursing Education.

"Observation is key to diagnosis, and art tin can teach students to wearisome downwards and actually await," Craig Klugman, PhD bioethicist and medical anthropologist at DePaul University in Chicago and co-author of the study, said in a news release. "Art is a powerful tool for teaching, and this program helped nurses and doctors become more than adept at observation and encouraged them to move away from making assumptions."

The study, "One Thousand Words: Evaluating an Interdisciplinary Art Education Program," finds students in the healthcare professions can effectively be taught visual observation skills through the apply of art.

Klugman, chairman of the Section of Health Sciences at DePaul, and co-author Diana Beckmann-Mendez, PhD, RN, FNP-BC, assistant professor of nursing at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, taught and evaluated Art Rounds, a semester-long course that brought together 7 nursing students and 12 medical students at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. The course, which was taught in 2012, offered an interprofessional learning opportunity for future clinicians who practice not ofttimes get the chance to have classes together. The students met at the McNay Fine art Museum for four sessions and in a classroom for 4 sessions, according to the release.

To hone in on observation skills, Klugman and Beckmann-Mendez taught students to use Visual Thinking Strategies, a technique originally adult to help kindergarteners look at fine art. They asked students, "What do yous encounter? What practise you encounter that makes you think that? What more than do you lot see?"

Each week, students used these strategies to look at artwork. Students likewise researched the artwork and artists and described them to each other, practicing listening skills. During one session, students were presented with live models wearing simulated peel conditions, including a rash and a removed tattoo. Students used VTS to examine these human subjects and diagnose them.

To measure their progress, Klugman and Beckmann-Mendez administered a pretest and post-test request students to draw images of patients and fine art. The researchers counted words in the student responses, coding them to measure changes in themes such as emotion, testify, medical language and storytelling, according to the release.

The change was significant in several areas, researchers found. After taking the class, students discussed emotions less and made more medical observations.

"Nosotros didn't teach students art terms, and as a result they drew from terminology they had already learned," Krugman said in the release. "Their linguistic communication inverse and tended to become more clinical." Overall, students used more words to draw fine art and patients, and increased their total number of observations.

Afterwards the course, students likewise told fewer personal narratives and stories and instead worked to translate the images using only the evidence earlier them. During physical examinations, Klugman said, it's important for clinicians to remove this type of bias.

"A clinician might notice ane affair about a patient, such as dingy easily or torn wearing apparel, and jump to conclusions without looking more closely," he said in the release. "Nosotros found that art tin teach students to see both the large flick and small details that tin be easily overlooked."

The gains students made in observation were not matched, withal, by an increase in students' empathy in their responses.

"By focusing on pure observation skills, students learned to observe and not interpret," Klugman said in the release. "As educators, we must be mindful of how we apply art and what we want students to go from the experience."

Fine art can be a versatile tool in the classroom, according to Klugman. At DePaul, he teaches a medical humanities course for undergraduates, and his course visits the DePaul Art Museum for one session to give students a taste of the VTS technique. He too includes novels, movies and a variety of storytelling and man experience in the arts, working to deepen students' connection with patients and themselves.

"When people become into healthcare, they tend not to stay in one place," Klugman said in the release. "Art museums give students an anchor in the community, a place to come up back to. In addition to building their observation skills, medical arts programs can requite students a lifelong relationship with the humanities."

WHAT'S NEW AT NURSE.COM

Nurse.com Chore Seeker

Discover how Nurse.com tin assistance you notice your next dream job.
Just sign upward and wait to be paired with your perfect friction match.