COMPASSIONATE CURIOSITY AND THE SOCIAL HISTORY - DEVELOPING A PEDAGOGIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL RATIONALE

Introduction: Increased awareness of social inequalities and health make the social history ever more important. But medical students and residents often fail to see the relevance to their role . Method: This presentation describes a teaching innovation informed by social epistemology and epistemic justice - that is the study of the relationship between scientific evidence and moral values. These are not oppositional concepts - we are concerned with how evidence and values interact and help us to combine our attitudes with our knowledge practices in clinical encounters. Compassion and curiosity are key concept that we can use to link values with evidence and apply professional and patient's knowledge and experience synergistically. A series of case studies based on the life course of real families were developed to bring to life the value of combining curiosity with compassion to help students understand the relevance of the social history and its value to the patient as well develop sensitive history taking skills Results ; The case studies helped students connect their knowledge with their own subjective judgements and to see that curiosity into a person's social experience and wellbeing, is not pointless prying but an act of compassion that may yield evidence based health gains.