Learning the Patient's Story

To provide a brief history on narrative medicine and highlight its importance in providing quality patient care. Explains narrative medicine using published, peer-reviewed literature and highlights some of the literary, medical, sociological, and communication perspectives that contributed to the narrative medicine movement. A commitment to the patient-provider relationship and knowing the patient's story is a critical aspect in providing quality cancer care. Teaching oncology nurses skills that are grounded in narrative medicine will improve health care by increasing the nurses' knowledge of their patients and strengthening the nurse-patient relationship.