The skills of improv are the skills of life. Improv teaches presence, resilience, adaptability, and collaboration — all skills we need in our day-to-day lives as clinicians, educators, administrators, colleagues … and as family members, friends, and humans. Navigating difficult conversations, handling conflicts, building trust, confronting biases, creating solutions, finding peace … We can use our MedImprov skills to navigate our unpredictable lives in ways that help us reach our goals of healthier, stronger relationships and communities.

Medical Improv is an educational and behavioral practice that applies improv theatre methods to the world of medicine, to improve patient care and wellbeing for all. It emerged in the early 2000’s from the broader field of Applied Improvisation, and has grown rapidly through innovative research and curricular development in the medical education community. MedImprov teaches skills that improve collaboration, communication, and cognition, and it does it in a way that reinforces healthy values of community and support.

The core elemental skills of improvisation are to Attune, Affirm, and Advance. Each of these core “AAA skills” encompasses an expansive range of personal behavioral and cognitive abilities that affect our complex interpersonal relationships. By learning how to know, validate, and enrich oneself and others with these skills, we learn how to co-create, collaborate, and communicate in healthy and resilient ways. The “AAA skills” form the basis for adaptive agility and communication so we can personally and collectively thrive in the unpredictable landscape of medicine.

Skills must be guided by values in order to be used for good. Embedded into the practice of Medical Improv are core principles and values that guide improvisational skills toward goals of community, support and care. For example:

Make each other look good.

Mistakes are gifts and opportunities.

Have ideas, not expectations.

Assume good intentions.

… and many, many others.

Medical improv teaches skills, and skills are learned by doing. MedImprov transforms “games” into powerful, active cognitive and behavioral exercises with structured facilitation and focused debriefs, efficiently teaching AAA skills and applying them to real-world scenarios for maximum learning benefit. The icing on the cake? These exercises are fun! The process of learning medical improv increases individual and team wellness.