Creativity as Essential Clinical Capacity

Join us for a 5-week online course that explores the intersection of creativity and clinical practice.

As AI reshapes clinical practice, creativity has never mattered more. Creativity invites us—clinicians and non-clinicians alike—to engage with our imagination, closely observe, reflect deeply, and express ourselves. It is essential to being human and to caring for others.

Yet creativity is often sidelined in technocratic biomedicine and medical training, treated as secondary to clinical efficacy rather than integral to it.

What gets lost, and for whom, when creativity is undervalued in healthcare? Is creativity a capacity that can and should be cultivated? What might it look like to recognize creativity as a core component of clinical education and practice? When creative practices and principles are intentionally integrated into clinical training and care, how are clinicians, patients, and families affected?

Narrative medicine offers a framework for understanding how creativity and reflection contribute to clinical knowing and effective, ethical care. In this 5-week, non-credit short course, we'll explore the intersection of creativity, narrative medicine, and clinical practice. Through readings, discussion, and experiential practices, we'll engage imagination, attention, reflection, and expression as foundational capacities for navigating embodied experiences.

Together, we'll consider:

• How can narrative medicine help us unpack the relationship between creativity and clinical care?
• What might it look like to recognize creativity as a core component of clinical education and practice?
• What can creativity help us understand more deeply—and what benefits can it provide?
• What might creative practice offer clinicians experiencing burnout, moral injury, or compassion fatigue?
• How can the principles and values of creativity be integrated into clinical training and work?

Participants will:

• Understand the conceptual foundations of narrative medicine as informed by literary studies, the humanities, creative arts, philosophy, and clinical disciplines.
• Develop personal and creative capacities—including close reading, creative writing, and visual art—as a foundation for intersubjective relations in clinical practice.
• Explore how engagement with multiple art forms—including fiction, poetry, and visual art—can deepen attention, presence, and ethical awareness in clinical encounters.
• Examine the theoretical and applied foundations of narrative medicine to better understand how creative practice contributes to clinical knowing, ethical care, and personal and professional resilience.

Audience

We invite nurses, physicians, physician assistants, dentists, chaplains, social workers, therapists, public health professionals and other clinicians, as well as writers, academics, artists, scholars, and all those interested in the intersection of narrative and medicine to join us. By combining these groups of participants, we learn how to unify what are sometimes divided efforts in patient care, integrating the ethical awareness and sensibility with the clinical recognition that can ensue.

Enrollment is limited to 12 students, and class will be held weekly online from Thursday, November 5—December 10 from 6:00-8:00pm Eastern Standard Time. Tuition and instructor information can be found below. Payment plans are available. For additional information, email Program Manager Aly Tadros at4030@cumc.columbia.edu.

About Narrative Medicine 

Developed at Columbia University in 2000, Narrative Medicine fortifies clinical practice with the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by stories of illness. We recognize that the central event of health care occurs when the patient gives an account of self and the clinician skillfully receives it.

Faculty