Shame and Medicine (360G-Wellcome-217879_Z_19_Z)

Shame is a powerful force in the everyday experiences of patients, medical students and healthcare practitioners. For patients, shame has been associated with treatment avoidance, increased burden of illness, and negative health outcomes, while also being recognised as a force that can sometimes motivate positive changes to lifestyle and health. Shame can influence how healthcare practitioners perform, interact with patients and other professionals, and cope with adversity. In addition, shame has been identified as a negative, yet frequently present, aspect of medical education. Despite the prevalence and significance of shame within various aspects of healthcare, at present, our understanding of the impact of shame, its many varieties, and other related negative self-conscious emotions, within medical contexts is incomplete. Shame and Medicine engages an interdisciplinary team working across medicine, medical humanities, and social sciences, in order to investigate shame, and related experiences, within healthcare. We aim produce new evidence on the experiential basis of shame, cultures of shame, and to investigate differential experiences of shame due to race, ethnicity, class and gender. Shame and Medicine is a ground-breaking interdisciplinary project that will propose new opportunities to improve the quality of healthcare delivery within a more responsive and effective health service.