Narrative Health: Empowering Patients to Own Their Stories
We welcome guest bloggers Haley Fleckenstein and Aleeza Rehman, who collaborated on a year-long Master’s Project that concluded in May 2025 at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in the Public Health Administration and Policy MPH program. For their project, they conducted a scoping literature review on narrative health and its implications for patient-centered care. This blog post details their project findings and reflections. Haley currently works as an administrative fellow for a southeastern-Wisconsin hospital system, and Aleeza is expected to graduate from the program in December 2025.
How often have you gone to the doctor and felt rushed, unseen, or unheard? Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon experience in the US healthcare system. Often, patients are depersonalized in the medical relationship, and providers do not have enough time to connect with their patients. We think that this relationship can be improved; our research project enlightened us on what is already being done to pay attention to this issue, as well as what could be done in the future.
The way clinicians interact with patients has a great impact on the quality of patient care and health outcomes. In the United States, our healthcare system delivers care to patients of diverse backgrounds, cultural values, and socioeconomic status. A concept that has emerged in the space of patient-centered care is narrative health. Our research found that the definition of narrative health is the practice of using storytelling to define and understand an individual’s health in a clinical setting. It emphasizes the influence of social determinants of health while understanding a patient’s medical history. It allows clinicians to use empathy, understanding, and listening skills to further connect with their patients. This concept was created to expand and improve patient-centered care, which is a form of healthcare delivery that focuses on an individual’s needs, goals, and personal values.
We found that the terms narrative health and narrative medicine were used interchangeably. Though they are closely related, they are two different terms. Narrative health is a broader concept that was made from the foundation and practices of narrative medicine. It is a newer term that opens up the application to any person, regardless of the role they play in health care. On the other hand, narrative medicine is more established and has been researched and applied in clinician training in different ways.
Imagine being able to tell your doctor your entire life story, how you got to where you are, and what is important to your health. This is the purpose of the life story interviewing technique that we found during our research. Using this technique, patients are interviewed by a research team member. This interview is recorded and transcribed into a written narrative which is approved by the patient and uploaded into the electronic medical record. This story can be viewed later by different members of the care team and referred to in later visits. One important adaptation of this technique is “My Life, My Story,” which is a program that was created to help veterans tell their stories to their doctors and teach narrative medicine concepts.
Life story interviewing is a great way to help patients be seen and heard by their doctors. Doctors have such limited time with their patients; if an entire visit could be dedicated to learning more about the patient as an individual, it could set the relationship up for understanding and mutual respect later on. The research papers which utilized this interviewing method demonstrated positive and mixed results, which we believe is an important indicator for continued research on the topic.
One of the most critical findings from the application of narrative health is that it helped patients develop a sense of self, feel more satisfied with their care, and build a stronger relationship with their provider. It helped improve patient experience, with many patients describing it as very rewarding for them. If we look at it from the provider's perspective, the interventions fostered a stronger connection with their patients, improved communication skills, helped build rapport, enhanced their professional abilities, and facilitated positive experiences. Medical students felt that the interventions helped develop empathy, improve patient relationships, and provided an experience not typically experienced in medical education. They thought it was convenient to integrate narrative medicine education into medical schools, signaling a future for empathetic, patient-centered care in clinical practice. It is very exciting to see a positive reception of narrative health from medical students and future healthcare providers. Its implementation in education can be part of its path forward to being a permanent concept in patient care.
Another takeaway from our project was the need for more quantitative research on narrative health and its impact on health. Much of the research in the field is still qualitative and centers on interviewing patients to collect their experience. While this type of data is undoubtedly important and provides insights into lived experiences, this limits the ability to collect measurable data for a specific type of narrative health practice.
Being in a master’s program, we were familiar with literature reviews and reading publications as a part of our academic journeys. However, neither of us had ever conducted a scoping review ourselves, and it was a great learning experience. It taught us the importance of collecting and synthesizing research to make decisions and guide future research, and it gave us an appreciation for how much data already exists.
We believe that narrative health is a promising concept coming into the public health and healthcare spaces. Future research on the topic could explore whether narrative health is useful for certain groups of people or in certain settings. Conducting experiments with quantifiable data in mind will help us to learn more about narrative health and how it might be used to improve the lives of both patients and providers.
