Investigating Medical Humanities. A comparative overview of the Italian and British approaches.

This research aims to study the process of implementation of the Medical Humanities (MH) practices in the current Italian and British healthcare contexts, still characterized by a biomedical predominance. The project is expected to identify the MH constitutive elements and its operational role in the development of the professional skills for individual health operators, multi-professional teams and the entire health-care organization. Within a sequential multi-method design it is possible to identify – through a grounded theory research – an empirical theory of the MH in Italy, which is then compared, through a cross-national study, with the meaningful English experience - where MH founded a formal acknowledgement and different forms of development -. To this aim the data were collected and analyzed by adopting a phenomenological research approach. The results reveal that MH in Italy are still in their infancy and linked to a narrative-based dimension: they require to be strengthened through a systemic approach that involves all the actors of the healthcare community at different stages of the MH scheduling. On the other side, in the United Kingdom MH projects seem to be following two branches of development: on one hand the core of this current of thought is moving from interdisciplinarity to a democratization process; on the other hand the research dimension seems to prevail on the educational one. The analysis of the two emerging theories lead us to understand that the MH main goal is to improve the quality of life of patients and healthcare professionals by supporting a scientific epistemology which includes a socio-cultural perspective, trying to combine person-centered care practices with a regard for the living matter process of resource optimization. To this aims professionals working within the MH necessarily need to follow a more rigorous methodology and evaluation; they must reflect deeply on their inner and hidden personal intention in planning MH paths to go beyond the idea of the humanisation of health services by a dialogue between different epistemologies; finally it is worthwhile working on MH educational and research practices – rather than trying to reach a conclusive definition – to reach a knowledge that is actually abreast with present times and to concretely show the potential change that MH can bring to the health-care context.