IPE Seminar Spring 2025 Course Descriptions

Registration is now open you can apply here. The application will close Friday December 6th 2024 at 11:59 p.m. 

Relationships and Spaces of Care

This seminar will interrogate the nature of the therapeutic relationship and the ways in which context influences the care provided. What defines a helping relationship, and how do relationships between patients and healthcare providers differ from other close relationships? What is required of the ones being cared for and the ones caring? What does care mean within the interprofessional team? What constitutes a healing environment and how is this reflected in the physical spaces in which care takes place (emergency rooms, birthing rooms, clinic offices, homes )? We will consider issues of professional self and other, intersubjectivity and intimacy, embodiment and boundaries, and interior states of caring or not caring. We will explore helping relationships in the context of birth, trauma, and end of life. We will probe how one prepares oneself for the life of professional caring and how one attempts to cope with the inevitability of loss and death. We will consider the implications of these issues for the everyday personal and professional experiences that we experience now and that lie ahead.

Aging and End-of-Life

This seminar explores the role of health professionals in advancing and improving quality of life in the aging population. The spectrum of topics includes successful aging in healthy seniors to end of life decisions. We face these issues daily in our work, our family life, through interactions with friends and colleagues, and in the course of our lives. The seminar includes careful readings and discussion of fiction, memoir, poetry, and film to better understand the role of the arts, volunteerism, palliative care, psychological distress, loss, and caregiving of the ill. We will share our own writing to examine personal experiences with advanced aging, serious illness, and dying. The policy implications of these questions—including the goals of senior housing, ageism, hospice care, requirements for palliative care services, “guarantees” of health that many think are being made by the health care system—will be faced. These topics are of particular import given the aging of the population worldwide and the health care debate to determine sound and compassionate policy which would allow all people to experience quality of life and dignity and to prevent unnecessary suffering at the end of life.

Spirituality and Healthcare

Students will learn approaches to Spiritual Care from the perspectives of the profession of Chaplaincy and from Narrative Medicine that are relevant to professionals from across the disciplines. Illness is often the site for existential and spiritual exploration of meaning. How can healthcare professionals assist patients and families to better understand their journeys of illness? This seminar will consider the questions that patients ask their health care professionals, and expectations some may hold about illness: “Why me? Why is God doing this to me? I’m expecting a miracle. Will you pray with me?” We will learn together, the differences between spirituality and religiosity, and the place for a non-believer or someone who is “spiritual but not religious” in the realm of spirituality. The concept of the “spiritual care generalist” will frame the seminar discussions—we are not learning how to dispense religious advice or sacraments but rather, how to identify spiritual concerns of patients and their families, and direct them toward the specialists who can help. For too long, there has been a taboo against asking patients directly about beliefs or faiths. We explore respectful and effective ways to invite patients to discuss and explore the spiritual dimensions of their illness experiences. Guest presenters will join our class to enhance and deepen our conversation. The class will create space for you to consider your own belief systems and relationships to faith in the face of illness. 

Healthcare Justice and Care for the Underserved

For millions of Americans, availability of healthcare is worsening; for millions more, lack of equitable and effective health care has been normative. From structural violence to implicit bias, this course examines the ways in which health disparities, healthcare delivery, and differential access to care between marginalized and dominant groups reflect pervasive racial, gender, economic, and environmental discrimination. Using an intersectional, anti-racist, and structural lens, we will focus on historically marginalized and oppressed populations, framing health care as a site of injustice. Students will expand their understanding of social determinants of health; identify and examine structural causes of health disparities; and assess the structural competency of healthcare provision on the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. 

For questions about the seminar itself, please contact Yinde Newby at ytn2102@cumc.columbia.edu.

For questions about registration with your program/school, please contact your Commons faculty representative: