Mainstreaming medical humanities in continuing professional development and postgraduate training

Although the medical humanities are increasingly well established in terms of scholarly research and undergraduate medical education, a notable deficit has been its low profile in postgraduate training and continuing professional development (CPD). We undertook to develop a programme in the medical humanities to address the deficit in CPD and specialist training, working with colleagues in a range of colleges and disciplines in Ireland. We describe the first element, a master class embedded in a series devoted to more traditionally recognised clinical aspects of CPD, webcast live to a range of hospitals across Ireland, whose focus was an introduction to the medical humanities by a panel of clinician scholars each of whom had published in peer-reviewed journals on the topic. Postgraduate colleges of medicine can play an important role in developing medical humanities strands in their postgraduate training and CPD activities. Given the relative novelty of developing postgraduate training and CPD in medical humanities, it may be worthwhile developing an intercollegiate platform among the wider range of medical colleges in the British Isles to jointly develop the most effective mechanisms to further propagate medical humanities and leverage the expertise of a larger pool of faculty in medical humanities.