[9-3] Finding the medicine in stories with care partners, people living with dementia and health professionals
Presentation language：English
This presentation details a project called Tangles in Time, a public storytelling performance about love, loss, living with dementia, and providing care featuring a cast of six community members and six health professions trainees. The project was developed between Jefferson, an academic medical center, and a local nonprofit arts organization called Theater of Witness with the goal of building empathy between medical and nursing students, medical residents, and community members with lived experience of dementia as care partners and patients. This presentation will focus on the design of the program, how it was integrated into other cocurricular and extracurricular humanities initiatives for students, results of qualitative research into effects of participating on student and resident empathy, and feedback from public audiences. Brief video clips will be shown featuring cast members. While the presentation focuses on one specific project, general principles of the format and process—e.g., storytelling with participants who include both health professionals and community members—will be shared as a model transferable to other institutions.