The art of good health

A recent conference revealed a genuine openness to the role of arts in healthcare settings, writes SYLVIA THOMPSON

THERE HAS been a huge growth of interest in the Republic in the area loosely described as art in healthcare settings. Projects range from a puppet project with children in four hospitals to patients in Waterford Regional Hospital writing poetry and drawing during their thrice weekly four-hourly stints on renal dialysis, to joint songwriting between musicians and patients in mental health and older adult day centres in Munster and Leinster.

More than 100 artists and healthcare professionals gathered in Dublin last week to tease out the way forward for such initiatives at a time when the Arts Council and the HSE are both writing their first policies on arts and health.

An initiative of the Arts Council and Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts, the Vital Signs conference and exhibition focused more on the artists’ work in healthcare settings than the patients’ experience of the creative encounter. Yet the very fact that these encounters are happening shows that a genuine openness to the arts in healthcare settings has taken root.

Pete Lunn, an economist with the ESRI, said that as societies become richer and people become wealthier, there is more money spent on education and healthcare. “With this increased spending comes an ever- increasing demand for quality healthcare,” he said. He argued that art in healthcare projects fits into this context.

Whether the arts have the intrinsic power to heal or whether they simply humanise the healthcare experience and bring creative expression into otherwise clinical settings received a lot of discussion.

Prof Des O’Neill, geriatrician at the Adelaide, Meath and National Children’s Hospital, said: “The way I look at it is that the lack of art in healthcare settings is harmful, rather than that the arts heal. We need our hospital environments to be imbued with the arts. We need paintings on hospital walls and music performed in hospital foyers.”

Katie Verling, director of Glór Music Centre in Ennis, Co Clare, spoke both as a member of the artistic community and a former patient at St James’s Hospital. “What’s important is the communicative ability of the arts to enhance wellbeing, not whether this can be scientifically validated or not. When I watched videos of horses in a sunlit field or boats going down a stream during my time in an isolated room at St James’s, it was a solace to me. It didn’t make me better, but it greatly improved the quality of my life while in hospital.”

Whether arts projects in hospitals can and should be validated or not was hotly disputed. Some participants said research was necessary for artistic projects to be accepted within healthcare settings, while others argued that taking on the medical model was the wrong route for artists working in this area.

“Artists will compromise themselves by adopting the medical discourse and lose their voice,” said Dr Austin O’Carroll, a GP in Dublin city centre. “Art in healthcare is about recognising that the environment affects us and about transforming that environment into a more human and interactive place.”

The role of good design in healthcare was also highlighted by Dara Carroll from MCOS Projects, the project managers for the rebuilding of sections of the Mater hospital. “Research has shown that patients who have views of nature from their hospital windows have shorter hospital stays, less pain relief medication, fewer minor complications and better emotional wellbeing,” he said.

Sheila Grace, arts director at St James’s Hospital, Dublin, said the arts have a role in developing a sense of community within a hospital. “Hospitals are very pressurised places to work and anything that promotes the humanitarian side of life is important. There is a huge emphasis on technology now, and arts programmes can help to refocus on the human and caring aspects of hospitals,” she said.

Ironically, one of the projects highlighted at the conference combined art and technology to link children in different hospitals by means of an online community (www.aiteile.ie).

“The children recorded their stories with video cameras and made multimedia journals that they could then share with other children in different hospitals,” said Helene Hugel from the Puppet Portal Project.

The role of the arts in health promotion was also highlighted. Mary Grehan, director of the Waterford Healing Arts Trust, said the arts help people engage emotionally with a health message. “Drink Talk was a project that artist Bernie Leahy developed to highlight people’s relationship with alcohol. In it, she included extracts from letters written by people with alcohol problems,” she said.

So, rather than getting a direct factual message about alcohol misuse, people could read stories of personal suffering that resulted from it.

Dr Nazih Eldin, director of health promotion in the HSE Dublin North East, said the arts have a value in their own right . “They may help in treatment. They may help reduce drugs needed. I personally believe that they do have a clinical value, but we don’t have to prove that. The arts bring feelings of happiness and contentment. They are as important as the air we breathe.”

Drawing the conference to a close, Martin Drury, art director at the Arts Council, said: “We have champions of the arts and health in Ireland now and I believe the arts bridge the gap between the patient and the person, but what we must do now is to provide policy so there is a commitment to this area on a national level.”

The Vital Signs art exhibition continues until October 21st. Tel: 01-6180250 or see www.vitalsigns.artscouncil.ie