Associate dean: Humanities will be 'part of the air that they breathe' at ASU's new medical school

Arizona State University’s new medical school got its accreditation this fall; the John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering plans to welcome its first class for the fall 2026 semester.

In addition to their medical training, those students will also be getting a heavy dose of humanities education.

Dr. Cora Fox is the associate dean of Health Humanities at the Shufeldt School and has been working to build that curriculum.

The Show spoke with her earlier and asked about her philosophy for incorporating humanities into the world of health and health care.

Samantha Chow

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Arizona State University

Full conversation

DR. CORA FOX: I guess I should start by saying that the idea that the humanities should be a part of the way that we teach and practice medicine is a very old idea, going all the way back to Hippocrates and to the idea that medicine is both an art and a science.

And there have been calls over the last 20 to 30 years by a lot of professional organizations that are invested in medical education, such as the AAMC. They've all posted reports asking for better integration of humanities competencies into medical training.

So you know, the way that I see what we're doing here is we are using the ground-up advantage, right? We have the advantage of building something new instead of trying to sort of put health humanities education into curricular structures that have already been built, we get to imagine really how the humanities might be essential for creating these physician, engineers, entrepreneurs of the future.

And so we've been developing out the curriculum, thinking very hard about what are the competencies within the humanities that are absolutely necessary for physicians and other kinds of health care providers in the landscape of our health systems and health institutions moving forward in Arizona in particular, but also in the United States overall.

MARK BRODIE: So what does that look like? If you're a student in the Shufeldt School, what will your humanities curriculum actually look like?

FOX: So we have, it is a required curriculum. It's at the core of their training. These are going to be very busy students doing a dual degree. So it's a small portion of the time that they spend in the classroom. But it's going to be highly integrated into all of their curriculum in foundational sciences and clinical skills and also their engineering curriculum.

BRODIE: Yeah, let me ask you about some of the specific competencies you're looking for. What kinds of things are you looking to train your graduates to be able to do?

FOX: Sure. So first, I can give you, we have about four that we have really put an emphasis on for the school. The first one is narrative competency, understanding not just patient stories and the role of communication in quality, excellent clinical care, but also thinking through what is the role of story and storytelling and narrative in the way that we perceive the moment that we are in, in terms of medical practice and clinical care overall. And so we are very focused on clinical communication skills, right? And that's just one of the competencies.

So the other three are interdisciplinary kind of ethics, ethical reasoning and critical thinking. So we're widening the concept of bioethics to think about ethics in more interdisciplinary ways. So that's the second competency.

And then structural competency and systems competency. So structural competency involves being aware of the systems and institutions and structures in which physicians work. And so we will be offering a course specifically in our curriculum on health policy, equity and access.

And then the last competency is intercultural competency. Sometimes people think about cultural competence or cultural humility, and we're using the term intercultural competency as an umbrella term that includes all of these different ways of thinking about what do physicians and health care professionals need.

BRODIE: You kind of alluded to this, but I want to ask you more about the integration of the humanities into the curriculum. Is the plan to have separate humanities classes, or is it more integrated even into the science or medical or engineering courses?

FOX: It's going to be both. And that in itself is an innovation. This is not often the way that this content is delivered. A lot of the competencies that I'm talking about are actually identified as really important competencies, but they sort of show up piecemeal in different parts of traditional medical curriculum.

In our curriculum, they're going to have their home in these humanities courses. But at the same time, they're also going to be highly integrated into the other courses that students are taking. And so that's the idea behind the curriculum overall, is for it to have its own home and to make it required, but also to make sure that it's seeded across the curriculum in ways that make its relevance obvious, right?

Make it part of the air that they breathe in the medical school overall.

BRODIE: I'm curious to get your perspective on the idea that health care is evolving, like between telemedicine and using apps. In Arizona, of course, there's been a provider shortage for a while now.

How do you see the humanities in this sector evolving along with the way health care is delivered and maybe to an extent the way patients expect and want health care to be delivered?

FOX: Yeah, when I was invited to come in and build out this humanities curriculum, I was really interested in how they were framing the possibilities of our technological innovations and the idea of our digital health future. And I really do think that a lot of the technologies that are being developed have the potential to give us better care from a humanistic point of view, right? To give us more time in clinical practice with physicians and to kind of open up possibilities for human interactions.

I also think, of course, the flip side of that is that having humanities training for people who are developing these technologies has the potential to help us navigate the huge ethical challenges that come along with, for instance, bringing AI into the clinic.

And so, I see it as operating in both directions. These clinical, the clinical skills will certainly, they will change or the way in which an actual clinical encounter takes place is going to change rapidly as a lot of these technological developments come on board and they're already changing, right? And so having people who are in those positions as physicians who can recognize the challenges of this rapid change and be adaptable to it and be able to also focus on their role as essential caregivers for other human beings.

That, to me, is ultimately the greatest challenge that we face, and this is why I'm so excited that we have a humanities curriculum that might give them the skills to meet those challenges as those technology innovations take place.