Embodying performance excellence in medicine: Can The Six Viewpoints help?

Abstract

Performance excellence in healthcare relies on skilled situational awareness, but there is no comprehensive framework articulating what within a situation requires awareness. Envisioning medicine as a performing artform, we introduce Mary Overlie’s The Six Viewpoints—a comprehensive, yet flexible, conceptual framework used in the performing arts world, for teaching, learning, and creating, for over 50 years. We imagine The Viewpoints could serve as a framework to help improve verbal and non-verbal communication and collaboration on medical teams and between providers and their patients. We call on health professions educators to experiment with The Viewpoints to determine how they could be adapted to support performance excellence in the medical arena.

Keywords:

• Situational awareness
• performing arts
• communication skills
• non-verbal communication
• medical education

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dr. Bradford Worrall for providing feedback on a previous drafts of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Kristina P. Kurker

Kristina P. Kurker attends UVA School of Medicine and is an Edward W. Hook Scholar in Humanities and Ethics. She studied biology and theatre and dance at Trinity College and is an alumna of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program.

Donna T. Chen

Donna T. Chen is a Professor of Health Humanities and Ethics, Public Health Sciences, and Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at UVA School of Medicine where she leads the curricular thread for Ethics, Professionalism, and Humanities. She is Founding Director for FusionLab, which brings together artists, students, scholars, and scientists for collaborative work to advance health, education, and social/disability justice.