ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Med.

Sec. Healthcare Professions Education

Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1601951

Analysing the Practice of Medical Humanistic Care Based on a Social Learning Model: Mapping the Trajectory of the Learning Dynamic Process from the Learner's Perspective

Provisionally accepted
Bilu  GuBilu Gu1Yiming  LvYiming Lv2Jiyu  ZhuJiyu Zhu2Xiaoling  SunXiaoling Sun1*Kun  LiKun Li1*
  • 1Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, Nanjing, China
  • 2Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Background: Humanistic care is a good glue for the doctor-patient relationship, and it is a general trend to improve the practice of humanistic care.Methods: A narrative research method was used to conduct semi-structured interviews with 18 master's degree nursing students from China who were in the clinical rotation stage, and the data were content analyzed and explored from the perspective of the learners who were learning about humanistic caring practices using the social learning theory model.There is a triple tension structure in the practice of humanistic care: At the cognitive level, there is a knowledge-activity rupture, with learners showing theoretical clarity but practical confusion.At the environmental level, it is divided into the dual role of facilitating and inhibiting environments."rewarding" environments included positive psychological attitudes of patients, caring-friendly departmental environment, perceptually rewarding mindfulness environment, and loving family environment. In contrast, "punishing" environments included patients' irresponsible attitudes toward themselves, poor care experiences, inflexible management mechanisms, missing incentives. At the behavioural level, there is a dialectical game between constructive and alienating practices. "forward" behaviours included personalized care in the details, respect for patient autonomy, proactive communication and empathy, systemic support and teamwork. Conversely, "backward" behaviours included mechanized procedures and emotional detachment, disregard for privacy and dignity, systemic issues that exacerbate apathy.Based on the framework of social learning theory, this study constructs a learning trajectory model of humanistic care to explain the synergistic mechanism between cognitive dimension and environmental system and its two-way shaping of caring practice behaviour.The study finds that there is a "black box" phenomenon in which the theory of humanistic care is clear but the practice of humanistic care is confusing in the cognitive dimension, and in the environmental dimension, there are systematic limitations in the traditional biomedical model.Based on the above two-dimensional analysis, this study proposes an optimization path combining cognitive explicit cultivation and environmental support system reconstruction, which points out the direction for breaking through the dilemma of humanistic care practice.

Keywords: Nursing1, Master's students2, Humanistic Care3, Education4, Qualitative5, Clinical Practice6

Received: 02 Apr 2025; Accepted: 19 May 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Gu, Lv, Zhu, Sun and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence:
Xiaoling Sun, Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, Nanjing, China
Kun Li, Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, Nanjing, China

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