2019 Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest: First Place Nursing Student Essay

Abstract

The Arnold P. Gold Foundation holds an annual essay contest to encourage medical and nursing students to reflect on their experiences and engage in narrative writing. The contest began in 1999 focused on medical students and expanded to include nursing students in 2018. Students are asked to respond to a specific prompt in a 1,000-word essay. For the 2019 contest, students were asked to reflect on the following quote and share an experience in which they or their health care team engaged compassionately and respectfully with a patient to help them feel accepted and seen. "I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself." —Maya Angelou. More than 300 essays were submitted. A distinguished panel of judges, ranging from esteemed medical professionals to notable authors, reviewed the submissions. Three winning essays from medical students and three winning essays from nursing students were selected, along with 10 honorable mentions. The winning essays will be published in consecutive issues of Academic Medicine and the Journal of Professional Nursing in the fall/winter of 2019. The contest is named for Hope Babette Tang-Goodwin, MD, who was an assistant professor of pediatrics. Her approach to medicine combined a boundless enthusiasm for her work, intellectual rigor, and deep compassion for her patients. She was an exemplar of humanism in medicine. The Arnold P. Gold Foundation infuses the human connection into health care. The nonprofit organization engages schools, health systems, companies, and individual clinicians in the joy and meaning of humanistic health care, so that they have the strength and knowledge to ensure that patients and families are partners in collaborative, compassionate, and scientifically excellent care.