Theme: Engaging with Art to Enhance Patient Care Skills
In this session, participants were given an introduction to the program of Art in Medicine’s partnership with the Phoenix Art Museum and the program’s objective of enhancing physician patient care skills.  Overall, the program seeks to improve participants’ skills in three areas: 1) observation, 2) removing ambiguity, and 3) communication.  In this session, participants viewed artwork and discussed their observations in light of ambiguity both before and after learning an artwork’s title.  Participants discussed how knowing the title could both positively and negatively affect interpretation and potentially limit further observation.  Reflecting on patient care, knowing the chief complaint before walking into a patient’s room is analogous to knowing the title of an artwork before viewing it.  Both can focus one’s observation but also limit it.
