Developing Empathy and Allyship in Future Health Providers Through Direct Community Engagement to Rewrite the Script for Equitable Healthcare

Abstract

“Rewriting the Script” (RWS) is a participatory action education approach that brings together community members who have faced inequitable treatment in the healthcare system and undergraduate pre-professional healthcare students, to have critical conversations on how to make healthcare more equitable. RWS builds on a prior digital storytelling project that revealed how parents of children with autism face a vicious cycle as they try to access healthcare and other services for their children, yet, these same parents often do not feel listened to or taken seriously by their healthcare providers, despite their deep knowledge. Using an arts-based, action-oriented methodology, RWS contributed to empathy development and inspired a budding allyship and desire in students to advocate for the communities with which they engaged. We demonstrate how the intersection of visual, arts-based representation of community stories and collaborative action is central to curriculum development that seeks to learn from, with, and beside community members about improving health outcomes and increasing health equity.