Associated organisationsUniversity of Birmingham · University of ExeterEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£1.5M
PeriodMay 2020 — Nov 2025
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Shame drives patients to skip appointments, hide symptoms, and avoid treatment—and it is woven into the fabric of medical training and practice, yet poorly understood. This project brings together doctors, humanities scholars, and social scientists to map how shame operates across healthcare: how it varies by race, class, and gender, and how it shapes the behaviour of both patients and practitioners. The problem is that shame is known to worsen health outcomes and erode the quality of care, but the evidence base for understanding its different forms and effects remains fragmented. If this research succeeds, it could reshape how medical schools train students, how clinicians communicate with patients, and how healthcare systems design services that reduce shame rather than amplify it. The immediate impact would be practical—better patient engagement, fewer missed appointments, and a more responsive health service—rather than a technological breakthrough. This is fundamental social science applied to a real-world human problem, with the potential to improve the everyday experience of millions of people interacting with the NHS.
View original technical description
Shame is a powerful force in the everyday experiences of patients, medical students and healthcare practitioners. For patients, shame has been associated with treatment avoidance, increased burden of illness, and negative health outcomes, while also being recognised as a force that can sometimes motivate positive changes to lifestyle and health. Shame can influence how healthcare practitioners perform, interact with patients and other professionals, and cope with adversity. In addition, shame has been identified as a negative, yet frequently present, aspect of medical education. Despite the prevalence and significance of shame within various aspects of healthcare, at present, our understanding of the impact of shame, its many varieties, and other related negative self-conscious emotions, within medical contexts is incomplete. Shame and Medicine engages an interdisciplinary team working across medicine, medical humanities, and social sciences, in order to investigate shame, and related experiences, within healthcare. We aim produce new evidence on the experiential basis of shame, cultures of shame, and to investigate differential experiences of shame due to race, ethnicity, class and gender. Shame and Medicine is a ground-breaking interdisciplinary project that will propose new opportunities to improve the quality of healthcare delivery within a more responsive and effective health service.
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