Anne’s approach to Ethics Education
Over the past two years, Anne Cunney, MS, has served as the lead ethics educator at ESNW, developing an ethics curriculum for children aged 6 to 12 based on Narrative Medicine.
What is Narrative Medicine?
Narrative Medicine focuses on the development of attentive listening, active sharing, and compassionate representation of personal narratives through close reading and narrative writing of various forms of expression, including poetry, prose, spoken word, dance, and visual arts.
More about Anne
Anne began her career in healthcare communications and then became a graduate of the Narrative Medicine Columbia University master’s program. For thirty years, Anne worked in the field of pharmaceutical marketing, where she was responsible for physician and patient research to uncover insights into opportunities to improve the disconnect that occurs during discussions about illness and treatment. Recognizing that careful listening was a skill often missing from these interactions led her to enroll in the Narrative Medicine Master Program at Columbia University.
Anne’s published opinion piece Home is Where Your Story Lives explored the importance of home in our sense of self identity and belonging and led her to design and field a series of workshops called Stories of Origin. Workshop curriculums include topics that are often central to our greatest fears, such as self-identity, inter-relationship, and the community of belonging. The resulting experience allows those of us placed in the role of witness (particularly the physician patient interaction) to explore and embrace our fears and generate self–healing and the improved opportunity for the healing of others. Anne presented the results of this work at the 2015 Health and Humanities Conference in Denver.
After graduating from Columbia, Anne worked as the principal investigator in a short-term study on the benefits of Narrative Medicine in creating improved staff inter-relationships, retention and patient care at Isabella Care in the Bronx. Following this she spent a year as a direct care professional in a home for developmentally disabled adults. She is currently writing a memoir of this experience.
In addition, Anne has developed a curriculum called the Magic of Storytelling that builds on the foundational tenets of narrative medicine to bring the experience of listening, sharing and caring to public elementary school children. She continues her work with adults becoming, last spring, section faculty staff for the Columbia University Narrative Medicine Certificate program.