Narrative medicine and stories of illness: Caring for the sick requires active listening

Narrative medicine and stories of illness: Caring for the sick requires active listening Narrative medicine and caring for the sick Within the theoretical framework of Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine, the present qualitative study adopted a narrative paradigm to analyse the role of narrative in the complex experience of illness and medical care. Specifically, it investigated doctors’ and nurses’ narratives of care experience as well as their representations of patients (Bateson, 1979) and patient needs (the need for containment, care and information about illness, the need to be treated as a person and not just as a patient). Modern medicine has shown that complex psychological factors, such as trust in one’s doctor and belief that one can get well, affect patients’ brains, causing cellular and molecular changes. The significance of illness is constructed via narrative practices and illness narratives are socially shared products (Bruner, 2002). The case study was conducted at Bologna University, School of Psychology and Educational Science (within a broader interuniversity research project led from 2011 to 2015 by the University of Milano Bicocca, entitled Narrative/writing practices in healthcare and educational contexts). It involved six doctors and six nurses (6 female and 6 male; mean age 45.37 years; all with over 10 years’ professional experience) at large and medium-large hospitals and elderly care units specializing in chronic, degenerative and oncological illness. Methods included semi-structured narrative interviews, focus-group discussions and workshop.