Interdisciplinary Medical Training wins 2025 Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching and Learning Award
Interdisciplinary Medical Training wins 2025 Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching and Learning Award
An interdisciplinary training session for medical students that incorporates the Ashmolean Museum and Humanities expertise has won the 2025 a University of Oxford Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching and Learning.
The ‘Diversity in Death and Dying’ session, which removes medical students from hospitals and immerses them in the Ashmolean Museum, deploys cultural objects and images to prepare medical students for end-of-life care. The session incorporates insights from palliative care, neuroscience, psychiatry, history, art, and theology, among other disciplines.
Innovative and cross-disciplinary training
This innovative medical training draws on the expertise of Gina Hadley (Clinical Neurosciences), Jim Harris (Ashmolean), Sally Frampton (History of Medicine), Ariel Dempsey (Theology), Joshua Hordern (Theology), Gabriele de Luca (Clinical Neurosciences), and Bee Wee (Palliative Care). The training also works with NHS practitioners as well as the innovative Expert Patient Tutor programme, including Jane Hannah, Lynsey Bennett, Victoria Bradley, Derek Bethell, Rachel Lane, and Sally Bromley.
As the tutors explain, the reality is that every doctor will encounter death in their training and, very likely, throughout their career. While death may be something that is always difficult to prepare for, this session enables medical students to discuss death and dying openly and with empathy, drawing on cultural artefacts to articulate fears, anxieties, and hopes. Rather than avoiding the subject or trying to define it as a purely medical event, the session fundamentally draws on the insights and expertise of humanities scholarship to situate end-of-life care and bereavement within a variety of cultural frameworks, while also integrating patient perspectives.
Tutors have published on their approach in The University Museums and Collections Journal, and the training has also featured in a Radio 2 ‘Pause for Thought’ Episode. By viewing and discussing various cultural artefacts in the Ashmolean Museum, from Mughal art to Tang Dynasty ceramics, medical students are able to understand the range of cultural traditions regarding the needs of the dead and the families they leave behind.
Image Credit: John Cairns Photography.
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