Dates

• 12 July 2026: 1000 – 1530 (GMT+8)

This narrative medicine encounter invites participants to engage in close reading — not of conventional texts, but of symbolic artefacts and reflections created by healthcare leaders in Singapore. These works emerged from a facilitated medical humanities workshop conducted during the Eastern General Hospital (EGH) Doctors’ Retreat 2025, where clinicians and leaders were asked a single, evocative question:

“If the hospital were a body, what part would you be?”

Supported by the SingHealth Duke-NUS Medical Humanities Institute, this reflective, arts-based initiative created space for healthcare professionals to consider their roles beyond function — through metaphor, material, and meaning-making.

Through interaction with natural materials, guided prompts, and shared dialogue, participants explored leadership as an embodied, relational practice. Their responses — expressed through anatomical metaphors and accompanied by written reflections — reveal the often unseen dimensions of care: trust, interdependence, stewardship, and invisible labour.

Viewers are invited to encounter these visual artefacts and narratives as “texts” for close reading, reflection, and response — hallmarks of the Narrative Medicine approach. Rather than centring traditional or Western literary forms, this encounter foregrounds locally grounded expressions rooted in lived clinical experience and institutional identity.

Across the works, a collective portrait emerges — not of authority or command, but of care as a distributed and sustaining force. Leadership is understood not as hierarchy, but as circulation: dynamic, interdependent, and responsive.

Together, these works invite us to reimagine the hospital as a living body — sustained through relationships, held in motion by systems of circulation and repair, and dependent, always, on one another.

Through guided reflection and self-paced engagement, viewers are invited to witness, interpret, and respond creatively. This is an opportunity not only to honour the voices and experiences of local healthcare leaders, but also to encounter narrative medicine as a powerful practice for cultivating empathy, meaning, and collective understanding within complex healthcare systems.