Using Podcasts in Health Humanities Education

The discussion of cases in bioethics education—especially clinical ethics education in medical schools—has been the leading pedagogical strategy for several decades. There are good reasons for this. One is that because time spent on bioethics education in health professional schools is limited, students need to be introduced to key issues quickly. Cases accomplish this, with the added benefit that this pedagogical approach is structurally similar to the teaching of other clinical topics (e.g., morbidity and mortality rounds, team-based learning classes, and standardized patient encounters). Another is that the dominant theoretical approach to teaching bioethics is principlism, which involves the application of principles to scenarios in clinical ethics, research ethics, public health ethics, etc. Sometimes the discussion of cases centers on “classic cases,” such as that of Karen Ann Quinlan or of Terri Schiavo. Other times the discussion of cases entails focusing on short, fabricated, and specialty-related vignettes in, for example, psychiatric ethics. But a problem with case-based approaches is that the presentation of these cases often seems too “thin,” and therefore the discussion of the issues raised by a given case may be superficial. Thus, other pedagogical approaches in health professional education have emerged in recent years, narrative medicine being one of the most prominent. In this chapter, a new approach will be introduced: using podcasts in health humanities education. This approach retains the advantages of using cases but adds the advantages of narrative approaches.