The enormous progress made by medicine in recent decades requires life-long learning, permanent updating of knowledge, skills, and improving of personal qualities of a medical specialist. It is obvious, that a specialist possessing high intellectual and cultural potential and characterized by greater professional mobility easily adapts to the changing socio-economic conditions and to new achievements in his field of science. First-year students of medical schools are people with a shaped personality, and still not enough educated people, sometimes lacking willingness to consider complex phenomena of social and professional reality. Willingness of a future doctor for a holistic perception of the realities of professional work, mastering the experience of world culture, dialogical thinking as an integral part of the professional and personal culture, interdisciplinary synthesis of knowledge – these and many other factors suggest changing traditional approaches to medical education worldwide.
As a universal process, the humanization of medical education should be implemented in all components of education: in educational content, forms and methods of the educational process, requirements to the level of training. These are the conditions for establishing the priority of human values, for the development of creative capabilities of faculty members and students, whose joint activity is aimed at providing truly humane, competent deontological attitude to the patient. The researchers of the higher education humanization process note that it is very difficult to develop a universal recipe for the optimal combination of general scientific and humanitarian components of professional education. The key prerequisite here is to create a flexible system focused primarily on saturation of scientific and special disciplines with humanitarian content.
One of the promising models of educational process implementing humanitarian components into specialized medical subjects was developed and tested in the educational process at the Volgograd state medical university. The model involves creation of pedagogical environment (so-called «pedagogical situations»), stimulating the development of required features (skills, experience). It comprises three stages:
1) situations of cognitive level – formation of students’ perceptions of interdisciplinary links of the humanitarian component of education through demonstration of its relevance as a means of initiation to the professional, social, cultural, moral and other kinds of experience;
2) situations of professionally-oriented communicative interaction ‒ the formation and development of the communicative level of professional competence and appreciation of the value of the partner as the carrier of a special system of philosophy, values, cognitive, personal experiences. These situations provide understanding of the multiplicity of beliefs, attitudes, fostering respect for the opinion of others, the development of ethical standards of debate and opposing.
3) situation of axiological problems solving. The sources of the problems are:
‒ the contradiction between the leading role of the methods of natural sciences (in medical training) and vast range of humanitarian issues, which can not be solved by these methods. These contradictions are modeled by a faculty member in problem situations that demonstrate the insufficiency of methods of natural sciences in addressing the humanitarian problems;
‒ the contradiction between the universal human values (altruism, loyalty and civilian professional duty, decency, morality, etc.) and the desire to achieve prosperity and social acceptance by any means. These situations are quite common in our lives when we observe the use of public office resources for private gain, the enrichment of the population by means of deception and deliberate advertising of useless, if not dangerous, medicines and procedures. There are worldwide known facts when new technologies were developed, the negative effects of which were not studied thoroughly and over a long-time period.
For the analysis of such contradictions, students evaluate the leading motives guiding the actions of certain people, form their own personal attitude and consider different humanitarian aspects of the problem. The presented model contributes to enhancement of interdisciplinary links of Humanities, forming a complete picture of humanitarian medical issues and willingness to be guided by universal values and ideals while addressing these issues. The outcomes of the model implementation into the teaching process demonstrated a significant professional axiological potential of the Humanities for the professional and personal development of a medical specialist.
The work is submitted to the International Scientific Conference «Fundamental and applied research. education, economics and law», Italy (Rome-Florence), 7-14 September 2013, came to the editorial office оn 05.09.2013.