Coffee with a Colleague features interviews with healthcare providers, educators, creators, and activists. This interview series promotes their work during and responses to COVID-19, and collects and shares these resources with the Health Humanities community and the general public. The series was published at the beginning of Fall 2020 in the online journal Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. This project was in part inspired by two healthcare provider projects, the "How Are You (Honestly)?" anonymous questionnaire series on the Emergency Med blog triage edited by Dr. Michael Barthman and the Our Break Room project founded by Dr. Rachel Kowalsky, Dr. Shari Platt, and Dr. Anthony Yuen.
Additionally, Sarah Berry gathered and curated online course syllabi and pandemic-specific syllabi for Medical and Health Humanities educators on the Health Humanities Consortium website (Craig Klugman made the materials available on the website). These resources are intended to help colleagues adapt to remote teaching and to provide humanities-rich pandemic resources and repositories.
The interviews promote frontline healthcare workers, educators, artists, and activists whose work advances the training of medical providers, care of patients, care of colleagues, education, and action during the pandemic and about the pandemic. It will make this work and the insights available to a broad audience, potentially leading to exchange, spread, and refinement of good educational, medical, and community practices of care (in broad sense of biopsychosocial-spiritual well-being) during the pandemic and help shape the ways in which communities and states carry on with our permanently altered world. Within this project, it's a priority to Berry to highlight social justice work that addresses the social determinants of health in coronavirus morbidity and mortality, and to amplify sociopolitical responses to the massive mental and somatic health disparities there as well as the racialized health effects of ongoing, pandemic-fueled, heightened anti-black violence and antiracist protest. N. B. Berry is working as a single interviewer, so she considered interviewees as collaborators when answering the Translational Humanities survey.
Explore the Humanities pathways that led to this project
Oswego, New York, USA