Building Empathy Through Storytelling: A Living Library Program Focused on Women’s Health

An academic health sciences library hosted a grant-funded living library program titled “Bringing Stories of Women’s Health to the Forefront.” With a campus that is increasingly focused on incorporating the humanities into medical education, the library added to this momentum by offering a program which encouraged empathy through the art of storytelling. The program was delivered via three routes: an in-person event for the city’s metro community, a virtual event for the university community and their clinical partners, and oral interview video recordings that are hosted on the library website. In order to host a successful event that met the needs of numerous audiences, the library pulled in the expertise of individuals from across campus, the community, and clinical partners. One key partner was the university’s gender and sexuality resource center (GSRC). The coordinator of the GSRC brought their knowledge and mastery of topics surrounding the medical humanities and gender advocacy work to the program planning committee. This program allowed the library to tap into current trends and social conversations about women’s healthcare experiences that challenge traditional understandings of healthcare like the popularity of social media stories about medical gaslighting and narratives about understudied illnesses largely affecting women. The recorded narratives are valuable as they provide local, visible connections to and examples of these broader trends. The narratives shared during the event went beyond the women’s healthcare topics that are typically shared in these types of spaces such as breast cancer and pregnancy. While those narratives were addressed, others also shared their experiences surrounding topics such as gender-affirming care, autism, urinary incontinence, lymphoblastic leukemia, living with dissociative identity disorder, etc. The living books shared stories from multiple perspectives such as their experience as a patient, as a healthcare professional providing care, as a researcher, and as a parent of a child receiving a diagnosis. These narratives can be used in a variety of ways to meet common pedagogical goals in health sciences education like understanding patient perspectives, gaining familiarity with disease discourse, and recognizing health disparities. The library recognized that past programming had been intended mainly for internal university and clinical partner audiences. This living library sought to reach a wider and more diverse crowd. The goal was to reach both existing and new audiences across the state. To do this an omnichannel marketing approach was utilized to promote the program and engage the community. This marketing approach drew on the expertise of a marketing and communications specialist and was built intentionally so that it could be replicated in future efforts to deliver successful programs. Success of the program was measured via survey responses and observations.