Three ways to use medical humanities for clinician mental wellness

A misconception is that healthcare workers are losing empathy. What’s actually happening is more complex.

As Nicole Piemonte, PhD, associate dean for faculty leadership, explains, clinicians hold deep compassion for their patients but are working in environments that limit their ability to act on it.

This disconnection may show up as burnout, emotional exhaustion or moral distress. Not because compassion is absent, but because there are too few spaces to express and sustain it.

Medical humanities at Creighton

Medical humanities (or health humanities) brings together disciplines such as literature, philosophy, art, history and poetry to help clinicians and students better understand the human dimensions of medicine.

The humanities expand scientific training, offering language and space to reflect on suffering, identity and meaning in clinical care.

Medical humanities helps clinicians:

• Make sense of suffering
• Name ambiguity and uncertainty
• Reflect on identity and meaning
• Process emotional and ethical complexity

The humanities also surfaces questions that do not have simple answers:

• Why does suffering happen?
• What does it mean to care for someone you cannot cure?
• How do I stay present in repeated loss?
• Who am I becoming in this work?

Medical humanities is embedded throughout Creighton’s medical education and is in development across residency programs, with the goal of sustaining meaning across the entirety of a clinician’s development.

This guide extends that work, offering practical ways healthcare professionals can integrate reflection into daily practice.

Three ways healthcare professionals can use medical humanities

In the pace of clinical work, reflective practice can easily fall away. The following approaches offer small, structured ways to reintroduce it into daily life.

Reflective writing

Short, unstructured writing for 5 to 10 minutes at the end of a shift or week can help clinicians process ambiguity and emotional weight.

Piemonte suggests prompts such as:

• Think of a patient encounter that has stayed with you. What is it about that experience that you can’t seem to let go of?
• Describe a moment when you felt most like yourself as a healer.
• What is weighing on you right now that hasn’t had a place to be acknowledged?
• What have you lost in this season of your work? What has sustained you?
• Where did you experience compassion today—your own or someone else’s? What did it look like?
• Who helped shape the clinician you are today, and what would that person want you to remember right now?
• What is one moment this week that reminded you why you chose medicine?

Structured reflection

One simple but powerful practice is the Ignatian Examen, which Sara Bharwani, EdD, assistant professor and director of Professional Identity Formation for Graduate Medical Education, describes as a way to take stock of the day by noticing where both connection and strain appeared. The purpose is to increase awareness within your daily life.

A brief version includes:

• Where did I feel most present or alive today?
• Where did I feel tension or disconnection?
• When did I experience connection—with patients, colleagues, God or myself?
• What am I carrying from today that needs acknowledgment?

Health professionals can also view this guided Ignatian Examen exercise, presented by Piemonte.

This can be paired with box breathing (inhale 4 seconds, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4) to create a short pause before or after reflection, helping clinicians settle into the moment as they process their experience.

Sharing stories

One of the most consistent findings in medical humanities work is that clinicians often assume they are alone in what they are experiencing.

Creating intentional space to name those experiences can be powerful. As Piemonte notes, when clinicians share what it feels like to be human in healthcare, it helps normalize vulnerability and acknowledges that caregivers are shaped by their relationships with patients and families.

These conversations do not require formal programming. They can begin with simple questions:

• That was a hard case—how did that sit with you?
• I’m still thinking about that interaction earlier.
• Has anything this week been sticking with you?

Living with uncertainty

Medicine does not offer clean answers or predictable outcomes. Clinicians are regularly asked to hold suffering and uncertainty without resolution.

Integrating medical humanities does not remove that ambiguity but rather helps clinicians live within it more fully. In creating space for reflection and acquiring language to express emotions and experiences, it supports providers in staying connected to the human reason they entered medicine in the first place.