Established in 1985, Healing Arts: Isle of Wight has developed a comprehensive arts in healthcare programme in partnership with the Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Trust, writes Guy Eades.
St Mary?s Hospital at Newport, which opened in 1991, is an example of the value and necessity of integrating the role of the arts into the initial design stage of a new health building. Its design incorporates visual arts, interior design, performing arts and landscape design into the fabric and structure of the delivery of healthcare services throughout departments. As a consequence, the arts shape the delivery of healthcare services in the long-term life of the hospital in a partnership between clinician, patient and community. This policy of the arts engaging directly with the health sciences creates a service that genuinely addresses health and the recovery from illness in a holistic and with a patient-orientated perspective.
The Healing Arts programme, with a wide-ranging cross-artform participatory programme, also addresses the needs of people receiving healthcare in the community. The emphasis is on the link between healthy living and being creative. Consequently, we develop and promote projects such as the link between child and family development with music and song; mental health through dance or through a person?s interaction with the environment, landscape and nature; or the understanding of change and ageing with the use of poetry and written language.
The work of Healing Arts is achieved through a close understanding and real working partnership between the NHS Trust, the Primary Care Trust, the charity and voluntary sector, the Arts Council of England, Southern & South East Arts, and the professional artists on the island. Together, they support an arts team working in healthcare whose purpose is not to cure illness or provide therapy but to enable each person receiving healthcare to realise their own personal creative ability and identity and use this as part of their experience of health and healing.
Our work is now broadening to encompass new definitions especially through the New Opportunities Fund?s ?Healthy Living Centres?, one of which is being created on the IOW. This is a virtual centre of 20 voluntary organisations involved with healthcare, working together in the field of mental health in young and older people to develop healthy lifestyles and lives. We have two projects: ?Art on Prescription? works with GPs and others on a core ten-week programme which examines individuals? approaches to creativity, how they think and how to make some sense of it all; and ?Music for Healthy Communities? works with young families in developing music and singing from pregnancy to school, and with young persons interested in music technology to compose and make music.
The challenge for the future will be getting the NHS to address its own culture, and identifying how it can forge genuine sustained partnerships with the arts and the creativity of each person so that this creativity becomes an integral part of its own culture. Staff who work in the NHS are still fundamentally trained in the sciences, logic and linear patterns of thought and make judgements that are primarily target and outcome-orientated.
Guy Eades is Arts Director of Healing Arts: Isle of Wight. t: 01983 534253; e: healingarts@iow.nhs.uk