Humanising Healthcare’s Conversation Café: transforming medical educationHumanising Healthcare’s Conversation Café: transforming medical education
Alcohol Alert Podcast
Humanising Healthcare’s Conversation Cafés bring medical students together with people in recovery to challenge stigma and rethink how addiction is taught. The guests describe the format, impact, and growth of this programme, including naloxone training and the role of lived experience in medical education.
34:10•25 Feb 2026
Humanising Healthcare: How Conversation Cafés Are Changing Medical Minds on Addiction
Episode Overview
- Face‑to‑face conversations with people in recovery help medical students challenge stereotypes and see addiction as a human issue rather than a label.
- Hearing detailed life stories gives students a clearer sense of the roots of addiction in trauma and maladaptive coping, beyond brief lecture slides.
- The Conversation Café format is intentionally unexamined, giving students space for honest learning instead of exam‑driven box‑ticking.
- Each session includes naloxone training, meaning students leave able to recognise and respond to suspected opioid overdoses in real life.
- Partnerships between universities, recovery communities and government support are crucial for sustaining and expanding this kind of education.
“Historically in medical education the roots of addiction have not really been discussed in any meaningful or effective way.”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? This conversation focuses on changing how future doctors understand addiction, by sitting them down with the people who know it best: those in recovery. The episode follows Dr Hugo Jobst, Dr Seonaid Anderson, and Allan Houston as they talk about Humanising Healthcare’s Conversation Café programme.
Hugo shares how, as a young medical student, his first Narcotics Anonymous meeting completely changed his view: he expected “really rough and unpleasant” people and instead met warmth, hugs, and stories of “journeys from destitution, isolation and into these new lives… full of meaning.” That shock set him on a mission to bring real recovery stories into medical education.
You’ll hear how the Conversation Cafés pair medical students with people who have lived experience of addiction, family members, and recovery community members around small tables. They move between groups, listen to a 15‑minute recovery share, and work through carefully chosen questions on the roots of addiction, stigma, and what actually supports long‑term recovery.
One student reportedly left “in tears, stating that she had learned more about addiction and recovery in an hour and a half” than in the rest of her training.
Allan, a senior addictions worker with 32 years in recovery, talks candidly about stigma in services and why he wants future doctors to “treat people like humans and not treat them because of their addiction.” Seonaid explains that students also learn something vital: they can’t fix everything, but they can understand the social basics people need to heal and signpost them better.
There’s a practical edge too: every attending student gets naloxone training, and one has already used it to reverse a suspected overdose on a bus. If you care about kinder, recovery‑literate healthcare, this episode might leave you asking: what would change if every medical student heard these stories face to face?
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