Enhancing Doctors' and Healthcare Professionals' Patient-care Role through Actor-training: Workshop Participants' Responses.

1Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, Sydney Medical School, The University of Sydney, Australia 2Independent researcher and theatre practitioner 3Department of Pharmacology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore 4Centre for Medical Education, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore Address for Correspondence: Prof Paul Macneill, Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, Sydney Medical School, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Email: [email protected] Introduction and Purpose Workshops for “Applying Techniques from Actor-training to Performativity of Doctors and Healthcare Practitioners” were held in September 2013 and January 2014 within Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (YLLSoM), National University of Singapore (NUS). The aim of the training was to provide healthcare professionals (HCPs) with both skills and an “embodied” understanding, as a basis for the expansion of their “performativity” and effectiveness in relating to patients. The rationale for these workshops was to offer HCPs training in acting on the grounds that: • Acting is to express oneself effectively and authentically; • Theatre work, including work with masks, is not to hide but to accentuate; • There are many parallels between “theatre” and “medicine”; • An ability to relate well with patients goes beyond communication skills and role playing and requires “embodied practice”—which actors are skilled in; and • Training as an actor offers a capacity to be simultaneously empathic and analytic. These were the underlying positions from an actor-training perspective, on which the training was founded, and we have provided justifi cations for them in a previous paper along with an elaboration of terms such as “embodied” and “performativity”.1 In this paper, we report participants’ responses to the workshops and the extent to which their responses supported our aims in conducting the training. There is support for offering doctors and other HCPs actor-training in the literature. Finestone and Conter, for example, contend that “doctors must be actors—better actors than they are now”.2,3 Dakin proposes “training of doctors in acting skills rather than just with the use of acting skills” by which he means going beyond the commonplace use of role-play to “train doctors in clinical situations when they feel genuine internal emotions”. He adds that “there may be even more to gain from our involvement with the acting profession”.4