National Healthcare Decisions Day aims to help people across the U.S. understand the value of advance healthcare planning. Save the date for next year: April 18, 2018.

The PLC Common Reading Program will build intellectual, social and co-curricular community among the students, faculty, and, staff of the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine through a shared experience of reading, reflection and discussion of challenging ideas and questions in medicine that raise important social and cultural issues.

That’s exactly what a group of Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine (HWCOM) students were doing on a Friday afternoon at The Frost. They’re called medical art rounds. And this was the first one held by the College through its Panther Learning Communities and Medical Humanities Club.

Art rounds, for short, are designed to teach medical students that there’s an art to the way of looking at things and people.

Marin Gillis, chief of HWCOM’s Division of Ethics, Humanities and the Arts, is a strong proponent of art rounds. She says studies have shown that, among other things, art rounds improve students’ diagnostic skills, improve their observation of human emotions in faces and body language, help them observe objectively, and communicate collectively.

“Other medical schools have educational interventions like arts rounds,” say Gillis, “but we have a unique collaboration with The Frost, the division, and the Medical Humanities Club that offers students a range of opportunities to enhance humanistic patient care as well as their own resilience.”

Medical art rounds are turning art museums into museums of science and students into better doctors.

The largest celebration for arts and humanities in the nation. October 2017

What is STEAM? In this climate of economic uncertainty, America is once again turning to innovation as the way to ensure a prosperous future. Yet innovation remains tightly coupled with Science, Technology, Engineering and Math – the STEM subjects. Art + Design are poised to transform our economy in the 21st century just as science and technology did in the last century.

We need to add Art + Design to the equation — to transform STEM into STEAM