On 4th July, a group of researchers, scenario planners, and healthcare practitioners from Oxford and beyond came together at TORCH to explore the future of the medical humanities, in a conversation facilitated by Sarah Dry and Matt Finch.
Working with a set of future scenarios developed at Griffith University in Australia using the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach, and subsequently honed on Oxford's Master's in Global Healthcare Leadership, participants explored how the medical humanities might transform beyond current hopes, fears, and expectations in times to come.
Scenarios - narrative descriptions of contrasting, plausible futures - are well-established as providing the basis for strategic dialogue, creative thinking, and judicious decision-making, as well as "interesting research" that is both rigorous and actionable. Scenario work requires skills closely aligned with the humanities (Finch and Mahon 2021, Finch 2024). It can offer a fresh perspective on ambiguous or debatable issues by rigorously generating "manufactured hindsight" from multiple contrasting futures. The Oxford Scenario Planning Approach, developed at the Saïd Business School, has particularly well-established uses in medicine and healthcare (United European Gastroenterology, 2014; IMAJINE, 2022; Ramírez et. al, 2023; Lang and Carson, 2025).
Participants in the TORCH session considered how patients, practitioners, researchers and others might be affected by worlds in which national security was an overriding priority and public health seen as a patriotic duty in a time of conflict; how fragmented understandings of truth, medicine, and care might connect or conflict in a world of polarisation; and how the profit motive might reshape healthcare in a scenario where private actors usurped the traditional roles of the nation-state. Insights from attendees' visits to different imagined futures then nourished a lively discussion about the scenarios' implications for the medical humanities today.
Find out more about the Medical Humanities Research Hub.
