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Starstruck

Starstruck
Creative Writing for health, well-being and fun!

Saturday 13 December 2008

The Role of the Arts in Medical Education

This autumn I’ve been working assiduously on a rather fine development among Lonely Furrow Company activities. Many, many people have expressed keen interest in these co-designed creativity workshops, my so-called Out of the Box Workshops. Targetting specific groups, each Out of the Box Workshop has a clearly-stated and totally-focussed aim.

At the moment, I am particularly excited by the prospect of running these with Tomorrow's Doctors! The medical profession, itself, is greatly concerned about aligning itself with the needs, hopes and expectations of its patients. And, as you read this, the General Medical Council is consulting on the kind of doctors medical education should aim to produce. (To take part in the consultation visit www.gmc-uk.org/tomorrowsdoctors.) The Medical Schools’ Council have also just published their 2008 Conference consensus statement on the role of the 21st Century Doctor (To see the statement, click on http://www.medschools.ac.uk/news.htm ).This impulse appears more Hippocratic than ‘free-market’ and is – in my view as a patient (sometimes) and lay observer (always) – very welcome indeed!

But, as a coach and creative workshop facilitator, you may ask, why am I getting involved?

Well, I've been looking at the work of Robin Downie (University of Glasgow Professor of Moral Philosophy) and Dr Jane Macnaughton (University of Durham Centre for Arts & Humanities in Health and Medicine).

And Robin Downie,in his chapter in Creative Writing in Health & Social Care 2004, indicates that creative writing and reading can help medical practitioners (and ultimately their patients) by developing:
1.Transferable skills such as:
a) an ability to write clear English
b) sensitivity to the nuances, ambiguities etc to be found in normal conversation
c) an ability to see connections between apparently disparate situations
2. Self awareness which has the added benefit of safe-guarding against emotional burn-out.

As it happens, co-incidentally, Lonely Furrow Company creativity programmes also have these outcomes as central to their aims. It's a small world, isn't it?

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