Introduction:

Art has been used as a teaching resource in medical education around the world. In Brazil, several “clown therapy” groups - a common name for projects in which students perform as “clown doctors” in hospitals - have been created with the aim of helping to humanize hospital care. Several studies have identified the impacts on medical training, as perceived by the participants of such projects. This study investigates how trained professionals view the influence of their previous experiences as clown doctors on actual medical practice.

Objective:

To analyze clown training in medical school as a strategy to contribute to the development of medical practice skills.

Method:

This is an exploratory and descriptive study with a qualitative approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 participants, who were chosen using the snowball technique. The sample consists of doctors who participated in clown therapy projects during their undergraduate training, in Recife, Pernambuco. The collected information was organized with the MAXQDA software and underwent discursive content analysis as proposed by Moraes, which follows a three-step cycle: the deconstruction of text into units of meaning, the establishment of relationships, and the capture of the emerging knowledge.

Result:

Analysis of the interview transcripts generated several categories of competencies reported by the participants. In the process of constructing new meaning based on these findings, it was necessary to select those that were related to the proposals of the 2014 National Curriculum Guidelines (DCNs) for medicine. The perceived skills were grouped into the following categories: awareness, resignification, dealing with error and physician-patient relationship.

Conclusion:

This research sought to explore the translational phenomenon, investigating which competencies, in the eyes of medical professionals, were learned from practicing the art of clowning. By drawing comparisons with the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCNs), intersections were found between expected development during medical training and some of the skills developed with the help of the art of clowning.

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