The use of narratives, including doctors' and patients' stories, literature and film, is increasingly popular in medical education. However, there is a need for an overarching conceptual framework to guide these efforts, which are often dismissed as 'soft' and placed on the margins of medical school curricula. The purpose of this article is to describe the conceptual underpinnings of a patient-centred approach to medical education initiated at the University of Michigan Medical School in the fall of 2003.This approach, Family Centered Experience, involves home visits and conversations between beginning medical students and volunteer patients and their families and is designed to foster humanism in medicine. The programme includes developmental and learning theory, longitudinal interactions with people with chronic illness, reflective learning and small group discussions to explore the experience of illness. The author describes the rooting of this approach in theories of empathy and moral development and explains the educational value that narratives bring to medical education. Specific pedagogical considerations are also discussed, including the use of activities to create a 'cognitive imbalance' and the concept of transformational learning, which can be applied to narrative medicine, professionalism, multicultural education, medical ethics and other topic areas in medical education that address individual and their health needs in society
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/1467-9566.00252