Public Responseto COVID-19 by Healthcare Professionals Constitutes Narrative Medicine

Meenakshi A. Darden

ABSTRACT Creatively, I use narrative medicine in the form of poetry and prose to explore my dynamic relationship with my patients, profession, and psyche. Academically, I assert that healthcare professional responses during the COVID-19 pandemic are public examples of the parallel chart, a narrative medicine tool.

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INTRODUCTION ◎ Healthcare professionals are uniting, educating, and empowering the public through established journalism outlets, publications, social media platforms, and personal blogs.

◎ Narrative medicine attempts to restore deliberate humanity to medical practice through active listening, close reading of experience, reflection, reflexivity, and recontextualization of illness, largely with respect to the patient.

◎ The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred one of the largest and most important developments in the substantive practice of narrative medicine, a sense of urgency and immediacy compelling the collation of patient and physician response into written word.

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LITERATURE REVIEW

- Academic narrative medicine is the application of storytelling to “recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness”

- Parallel charts are concurrent literary endeavors that yield to and channel the fullness of the physician response to the patient encounter, with the ultimate goal of a reverberant, synergistic relationship anchored in honest intercommunication

- Pieces by healthcare professionals have substantively shaped public opinion and national policy, providing accurate reports of challenges frontline healthcare workers and patients are encountering in real-time

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THESIS STATEMENT

The COVID-19 pandemic has blurred the lines between patient and physician, fundamentally altering the discourse around illness, and it is unfolding through narrative medicine in the form of public parallel charts examining patient experiences, healthcare professional experiences, and subsequent interactions influenced by the pandemic.

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Dr. Laura Mulvey,

emergency medicine

physician at Maimonides

Medical Center,

isolated with COVID-19

infection

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DISCUSSION AND

EVIDENCE

Narratives published by healthcare professionals address the following:

- Socioeconomic injustice and inequity- Public health and safety- Infrastructure inadequacies resulting in

substandard patient care- Lack of equipment and impact on patient care- Impact of COVID-19 on provider well being- Sheer burden of disease- Experience of illness alongside the patient

and patient’s family- Navigating an uncertain future together

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CONCLUSION AND

SIGNIFICANCE

- Narrative medicine is a practical, useful academic framework for understanding the uncharted terrority of COVID-19.

- The servant leadership and transparency demonstrated by healthcare professionals during COVID-19 has the potential to revitalize and re-humanize the field of medicine in the public view.

- Narrative medicine around COVID-19 empowers patients and their families with knowledge and agency, includes communities in conversation, and shares together in the experience of illness.

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