This volume explores how countries across South and Southeast Asia are reimagining health professions education through the integration of the humanities. Drawing on rich case studies from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, the volume highlights culturally grounded innovations that bring empathy, ethics, reflection, and narrative into clinical learning.

From traditional healing practices and narrative medicine to arts-based pedagogies incorporating theatre, literature, music, dance, cinema, visual arts, and reflective storytelling, the book demonstrates how humanistic approaches are reshaping curricula and professional identity formation across the region. The contributors examine both the opportunities and the challenges of integrating the humanities into health professions education, including structural barriers, policy gaps, faculty development needs, and resource constraints. At the same time, they provide practical strategies and inspiring examples of implementation in diverse educational contexts.

Bridging global educational frameworks with local philosophical, artistic, and cultural traditions, this interdisciplinary volume offers a unique regional perspective on medical and health humanities. It also highlights the growing importance of compassion, communication, cultural sensitivity, and person-centred care in an era increasingly shaped by technology and artificial intelligence.

Designed for educators, curriculum developers, researchers, students, and policymakers, this book will be an essential resource for those working across medicine, nursing, public health, education, and the humanities. Importantly, the World Health Organization’s South-East Asia Region has recently passed a landmark resolution encouraging the integration of health humanities into health professional education and training. This volume aligns closely with this emerging regional vision and offers timely perspectives, innovative models, and practical approaches for the future development of humane and culturally grounded healthcare education across Asia. More broadly, the volume is a call to humanise healthcare education by reconnecting professional training with the social, cultural, ethical, and emotional dimensions of healing.

Saroj Jayasinghe is an Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and a practicing clinician and consultant physician. He was appointed the founder Head of the Department of Medical Humanities, University of Colombo, in 2016, the first such department dedicated to the field in Sri Lanka, and perhaps in southern Asia. He has led several initiatives to promote Medical Humanities in Sri Lanka and the wider region. He is the Convener of the Global Network for Health Humanities, which was initiated in Colombo in July 2023, and played a key role in promoting a resolution on Health Humanities in the WHO South-East Asia Region, which was unanimously adopted by the region’s Ministers of Health in October 2025.

P Ravi Shankar is currently a faculty at the IMU Centre for Education, Malaysia. He was one of the pioneers in developing the health humanities in Nepal. He is a researcher with diverse interests and ranked in the top 2% of global ranking in the Stanford University’s “World’s Top 2% Scientists list”. He is an academic editor at PLoS One. He is a member of the Academy of Health Professions Educators and a fellow of the Academy of Medical 
Educators. 

Madhusudan Subedi is a Professor of Health Social Sciences at the Patan Academy of Health Sciences, Nepal. He is the Former Chair of the Department of Community Health Sciences in the School of Medicine and the School of Public Health. He is one of the founding faculty who teaches ‘Humanities in Medicine, Nursing and Public Health’ in Nepal. Prof. Subedi has published over 150 academic articles and authored/edited 6 books.  His scholarship focuses on systemic barriers on health equity and social transformations.