SingHealth Duke-NUS Medical Humanities Institute

Join us in this immersive experience designed to foster perspective-taking, reflection, and meaningful dialogue. 💬

🗓️ Date: 10 July 2026 (Friday)
⏰ Time: 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
📍 Venue: Academia, Level 2 White Space

Step into a unique and safe space to engage with characters and narratives that both challenge and resonate, while sharing personal insights with fellow healthcare colleagues.

All healthcare professions are welcome. Register now: https://form.gov.sg/69cb61698a936aa4153ea2d2

❤️ Today's HEART Feature: The Hands that Taught Me

Sometimes, the people we think we are helping are the very ones who end up teaching us the most.

In The Hands that Taught Me, Madhu shares a moving reflection on her experience volunteering with Zoe, a young girl living with a rare skin disorder and double amputations. What begins as an encounter marked by discomfort and uncertainty becomes a profound lesson in resilience, courage, and the quiet strength of simply living joyfully despite life's challenges.

Madhu is a final-year medical student at Duke-NUS Medical School with a passion for the medical humanities. Trained in Anthropology, she uses writing to make sense of her encounters in medicine and to cultivate the empathy and thoughtfulness she hopes to bring to her future practice.
Her essay is a reminder that learning in healthcare often happens beyond the classroom—and that some of our greatest teachers come in the most unexpected forms.

📖 Read The Hands that Taught Me:
https://www.heartbysdmhi.com/p/3dd62399-d48c-40f8-a48f-d910063f9d3a/

💌 Subscribe to HEART for more stories from the human side of healthcare:

https://heartbysdmhi.substack.com/publish/post/200393808?r=47ql22&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

This week’s brilliant poem comes from Jonathan at KK Women's and Children's Hospital — and once you read it, you’ll understand exactly why we had to share it. Thoughtful, moving, and quietly powerful.

Read it here:
https://heartbysdmhi.substack.com/p/pharmacy

———————————————

The SingHealth Duke-NUS Medical Humanities Institute (SDMHI) is a joint institute of the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre. The SDMHI aims to integrate the arts and humanities with healthcare to foster compassionate, patient-centered care, by building on the strengths of both SingHealth and DukeNUS.



HEARTbySDMHI narrativemedicine

🌟 Turning Fear into Courage: A CHEER™️ Story from KKH 🌟

"She’s scared of the machine. The last time she had an x-ray, she cried the whole night."

When Lily came to the CT scan room, she was terrified. But our amazing radiographer knew exactly what to do. With a little help from "Buzzy the bravery bear" and a lot of patience, Elizabeth turned a scary moment into a space adventure! 🚀🐻

By the end, Lily hugged her bear and whispered, "That wasn't scary at all."

This beautiful moment of Empathy and Compassion was captured by Lim Peng Hoon, Senior Principal Radiographer at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital. It reminds us that our profession isn’t just about positioning patients correctly—it’s about meeting them where they are, especially when they’re small and scared.

📖 Read the full inspiring story in on Substack or ourwebsite, celebrating our shared commitment to CHEER {Compassion, Humility, Empathy, Encompassing, and Respect}!

Link: https://heartbysdmhi.substack.com/p/empathy

🎉 A huge shoutout to all participants who joined us for the Ethics Primer Training at KKH on 14 May 2026!

Thank you for showing up with curiosity, openness, and a genuine commitment to ethical practice. Navigating the complex moral terrain of medicine — from decisions around experimental treatments to end-of-life care — is never easy, and your willingness to engage with these challenges head-on is truly commendable.

Over the course of this interactive workshop, you explored the Four Meta-principles of Bioethics (Beauchamp & Childress) and Jensen et al.'s Four-Box Approach, sharpened your ability to identify and analyse ethical issues, and strengthened how you document ethical reasoning in your clinical decisions. No small feat!

We hope you walk away better equipped to make considered, sound ethical decisions — for your patients, their families, and your teams. Until the next one! 💙

Thank you to the International Collaboration Office for the valuable link-up and coordination. The SDMHI team was pleased to meet with Ms Yuexia and Ms Lei Yu from Jiaotong University.

We had a wonderful discussion with meaningful exchanges on potential areas of collaboration and future engagement. We appreciate the opportunity to connect and look forward to strengthening international partnerships moving ahead.

Ahead of Mother’s Day, but really for anyone who has ever felt they aren’t quite measuring up. 🤍

This week on HEART, Dr Victoria Ekstrom wrote about wanting to be a doctor and a mother for as long as she could remember, and how the childhood picture (medical dramas, perfect hair, no spilled coffee on the white coats) collided with the actual thing — IVF, an emergency caesarean, postpartum anxiety, and the slow conviction that going part-time meant she was failing on both fronts. 🕊️

Read the full story here ✨:
🔗 https://www.heartbysdmhi.com/good-enough/
🔗 https://heartbysdmhi.substack.com/p/good-enough

---

The SingHealth Duke-NUS Medical Humanities Institute (SDMHI) is a joint institute of the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre. The SDMHI aims to integrate the arts and humanities with healthcare to foster compassionate, patient-centered care, by building on the strengths of both SingHealth and DukeNUS.

🚨 Registration Now Open: MME 3 & 4 🚨

Calling all SingHealth doctors — don’t miss your chance to join MME 3 & 4!

Continue building your knowledge and skills with this upcoming series designed to support your clinical and professional development.

📅 MME 3: 15 July 2026, 1–2pm
📅 MME 4: 14 October 2026, 1–2pm
📌 Open to: SingHealth doctors

📝 Register here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=Xu-lWwkxd06Fvc_rDTR-grqT7ijeN8tBsIpSOqxz28pUQTAwTlZDWk1URDRWUzZXVUI4VzZCVks0USQlQCN0PWcu

💻 Zoom link will be provided upon successful registration

🌧☀️ New on HEART — Four Seasons in the Hospital

A winning entry from the CHEER™️ Healing Tales 2025 contest that truly stopped me in my tracks.

Jean captures the emotional weather of hospital corridors so poignantly — and what it means to stand in the rain with your patients, even while carrying your own storms.

Short, honest, and beautifully written. Worth three minutes of your day.

Read it here: https://heartbysdmhi.substack.com/p/four-seasons-where-only-two-exist

———————————————

The SingHealth Duke-NUS Medical Humanities Institute (SDMHI) is a joint institute of the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre. The SDMHI aims to integrate the arts and humanities with healthcare to foster compassionate, patient-centered care, by building on the strengths of both SingHealth and DukeNUS.



HEARTbySDMHI narrativemedicine