What is the positive change that has emerged through new collaborations or partnerships during Covid-19 that your project is going to embed?

Narrative medicine has been shown to be associated with a number of desirable outcomes, including “relationship-building, empathy, perspective-taking/reflection, resilience and burnout detection/mitigation, confidence/personal accomplishment, narrative competence, and ethical inquiry.” Strengthening such competencies is essential, especially as COVID rages. Paradoxically, COVID has resulted in many substantive improvements to how we deliver care; however,  many of these stories are not captured, or if they have been documented, often lack as Mary Dixon Woods has pointed out, the necessary contextual factors that were essential to success.

We believe developing a narrative medicine programme will strengthen the participants and assist the wider healthcare system in learning what worked successfully during the pandemic and critically what were the key general and local success factors.