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Writing for healthcare: Opportunities and challenges for higher education

Research and practice should be comrades, not enemies. When I teach undergraduate students at Widener University about applied writing for healthcare (as well as other professional fields), I emphasize the interplay of research and practice: theoretical foundations from research inform contextualized applications in practice. Nonetheless, interjection of applied professional courses into curricula at liberal arts institutions can run afoul of traditionalists who, understandably, seek to safeguard academic rigor. I, too, share their aspiration. In the past, I have taught courses on the medical humanities that have been mutually rewarding to students and myself. However, as this journal’s editor noted in her March 2014 editorial, ‘[h]ealth communication is not exempt from this challenge’ to meld research and practice. Let me expand on how the academy might rise to the challenges and opportunities afforded by healthcare communication through an analysis that focuses on the intersection of my own field of professional writing with other areas of research and practice. The academic discipline of professional writing challenges students to be immersed not only in their own learning, but also with partners representing their communities, clients, and colleagues. Despite its applied nature, professional writing has its disciplinary roots in the medieval trivium: grammar (writing mechanics), logic (critical thinking), and rhetoric (persuasive argument). Even Aristotle stressed that education requires practice. Whether students learn from theory or praxis is less important than achieving education’s goal ‘to provide a foundation for how to live life.’ In striving for this lofty goal, academicians need not pit categories of courses against each other. ‘What is important is that the student learns to think and to reason. This point of view forces the academy to place learning above teaching.’ Healthcare communication already has a foothold in leading this paradigm shift for higher education. Medical education is a good place to start. The rigors of this discipline need no elaboration for the audience of this journal; certainly, the medical curriculum has no room for courses that do not yield value. Yet medical schools typically include reflective writing within their challenging curricula. In reflective writing, medical students step back from their experiences with patients to reflect on humane treatment, interpersonal communication, ethical implications, and other characteristics associated with personal and professional growth. Not all students, of course, gravitate to reflective writing, which may appear too soft when compared with science. Keeping the students’ perspective in mind, however, can help faculty to construct reflective assignments that speak more directly to the usefulness of this activity. And isn’t that the point of combining theory with practice in higher education? Nursing is no laggard in this pedagogical movement. Communication of nurses with patients and other healthcare professionals remains a key point in nursing education. Given that their curricula are similarly filled with many science-focused courses, nursing educators borrowed from the researchgrounded constructs termed Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), Writing in the Disciplines (WID), andWriting to Learn (WTL). Nursing educators realize the value of melding research and practice: ‘Writing must be integrated across departmental boundaries to promote student writing skill.... Only by practicing writing within a specific discipline will students begin to effectively communicate within their discipline.’ Their success with using integrated writing assignments supports more interdisciplinarity. Indeed, opportunities for interdisciplinary pedagogies in healthcare communication include expansion into the communities that we serve. In serviceoriented courses, faculty challenge students to expand their theoretical knowledge of content through the practical application of context. In