Healthcare Management Humanities Institute (HMHI)
Healthcare leadership needs more than operational expertise.
• INSTITUTE
The Healthcare Management Humanities Institute integrates literature, history, ethics, narrative, and reflective practice into healthcare leadership and management education. HMHI develops and studies approaches that help leaders think critically, communicate across difference, make principled decisions, and remain connected to the human meaning of their work.
WHY THE HUMANITIES BELONG IN HEALTHCARE MANAGEMENT The most difficult leadership questions are also human questions.
Healthcare leaders make decisions inside systems shaped by urgency, technology, limited resources, unequal experiences, and competing responsibilities. Management tools remain essential, but they do not answer every question leaders face.
The humanities help leaders examine values, bias, identity, responsibility, suffering, trust, and change. Through reading, writing, dialogue, history, and ethical inquiry, leaders gain language and perspective for situations that cannot be reduced to a procedure or metric.
What humanities-based learning develops
Self-awareness: Greater insight into values, bias, professional identity, and leadership presence.
Ethical reasoning: Stronger capacity to examine competing obligations and make principled decisions.
Narrative competence: More attentive listening, clearer communication, and deeper understanding of how people experience care and work.
Relationship management: Greater empathy, trust, collaboration, and ability to work across disciplines and hierarchies.
Purpose and resilience: Opportunities to make meaning, reconnect with purpose, and reflect on the emotional demands of healthcare work.
Change leadership: Historical, literary, and case-based perspectives for navigating ambiguity and transformation.
What HMHI does
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Conduct and support interdisciplinary inquiry into healthcare leadership, the future of work, staff and patient experience, technology, ethics, purpose, and the role of the humanities in management education.
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Develop humanities-integrated courses, certificates, discussion guides, and leadership-learning experiences with academic institutions and healthcare organizations.
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Create workshops, webinars, symposia, reading experiences, and facilitated conversations that connect scholarship with the realities of healthcare work.
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Share findings, frameworks, and perspectives through articles, presentations, conferences, panels, and collaborative projects.
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Work with literary, cultural, academic, healthcare, technology, behavioral-science, and management partners to examine leadership from multiple points of view.
Signature Work
Healthcare Humanities Research Hub
Interdisciplinary research connecting arts, ethics, narrative, philosophy, and healthcare leadership.
Leadership Insights Series
In-person or virtual sessions translating research, scholarship, and field experience into useful frameworks for healthcare leaders.
Curriculum for non-clinical leaders
Humanities-integrated management education developed with academic and healthcare partners.
Bellevue Literary Review partnership
A partnership supporting literary work at the intersection of health, illness, healing, and shared humanity, including Leslin's sponsorship of the John and Eileen Allman Poetry Prize.
Featured Insights
• WORK WITH LESLIN