Two-Dimensional Deaths? A Discourse Analysis of Patient Death in Preclinical Tutorial Cases at a Canadian Medical School

The prospect of death is everywhere, but seldom directly addressed, in undergraduate medical education (UGME). Despite calls for UGME curricula to address the complex social and emotional aspects of death and dying, most curricula focus on biomedical, legal, and logistical aspects, or concentrate these topics within palliative care content and/or in simulations with simulated patients and manikins. We aimed to add to death education scholarship by exploring the complexities of death and dying within two dimensional simulations-i.e., in the text-based cases used in Case-Informed-Learning (CIL).