Healthcare and the humanities: interdisciplinary collaboration

Ian Walsh, Senior Lecturer, School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, Queen’s University Belfast

Join the EBN Twitter chat on Wednesday 5 June 2019, 8pm – 9pm UK time, hosted by Mr Ian Walsh, Senior Lecturer within the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast. It focuses on art in health care and explores the intersections of each fields.
Participating within the Twitter chat requires a Twitter account; If you haven’t got one yet, you’ll be able to create an account at www.twitter.com. Once you have got an account contributing is easy, you’ll be able to follow the discussion by trying to find links to #ebnjc (EBN chat hash tag) and contribute by sending a tweet (tweets are text messages currently limited to 140 characters), you should add #ebnjc to your tweet because this fashion all participants will give you the option to see your tweets.
The connection between art and health care has long been recognized but stays poorly defined. Both fields profit from interaction and collaboration, which might potentially promote well-being and improve quality of life. The Arts Council encourages the utility of arts-based innovations and interventions in practice and education, which states that “good arts and health practice is characterized by clear artistic vision, goals and outcomes.” http://www.artscouncil.ie/Arts-in-Ireland/Arts-participation/Arts-and-health/

It is evident that art has advantages in healthcare. Indeed, we recently wrote about it in a newspaper detailing the impact of Renal Arts Group on patient outcomes, and PhD student Claire Carswell accomplished a study examining using an arts-based intervention in a kidney dialysis unit with very positive results. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/health/northern-ireland-residents-on-how-getting-to-art-of-the-matter-helped-them-cope-with-dialysis-37993451. HTML
The patients who took part within the study produced excellent artwork and asked for his or her work to be continued on the ward after the study was accomplished.
If health care and the humanities are to proceed to work closely together, it’s imperative that we clearly define the advantages of this collaboration for artists. This Twitter chat goals to explore several questions:
a) What are artists’ views, perceptions and approaches to artistic interventions in healthcare?
b) What does health care should offer to art?
c) How does interdisciplinary collaboration (between the humanities, humanities and healthcare) differ from interprofessional collaboration (between healthcare professionals)
d) How does such interdisciplinary cooperation fit into the broader context of interconnectedness and humanism?

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