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It's a really big and diverse program.
A huge range of things that are actually offered that aren't well known.
It's a fabulous program. It's a great place to work. It's professional,
because it makes people's experiences in hospital hopefully a better experience and a less stressful
experience. For the rest of my life it's something I'll
never forget. You know, medicine isn't the only answer;
there are other options. It's a program that has lots of potential
Arts in Health at Flinders Medical
Centre, FMC, is a unique program in South Australia that is integrating arts into the
daily life of the hospital and enhancing Flinders Medical Centre's role as a leading health
promoting hospital. The program is managed by an active support committee of South Australian
arts and health professionals. So, the program is multi-faceted.
We have four galleries that we operate with regular changing exhibitions, and we have
a series of workshops that we run: drawing workshops, musical instrument making workshops.
Part of that is to encourage people to come into the hospital when they're not sick so
they have a positive experience of being in the hospital. We're a public institution and
we want people to feel that we're not interested just in their illness when they're sick but
also the whole of them. Different performances on
the ward that vary from live music to puppetry, storytelling, and dance, and I think this
is just a fantastic program. Whenever people engage in it, from the patients' and the staff's
point of view, they have a great time. We have a weekly music performance
program. We have an art trolley that runs out one day a week, and we have a series of
public art works that have been commissioned for the hospital. On top of our regular program,
we also have a program of projects that run throughout the year. So earlier in the year
we had puppeteers working in the hospital and a felting project, and at the moment we
have a storyteller who's telling stories to patients on the ward. And then we have another
project later in the year called the Flags of Hope. So the program is really set up to
make the hospital a more warm and welcoming face for people to visit, and also hopefully
we can support patients and also the staff in their visit to hospital.
Gardens and gallery spaces, public
art and performances provide a break from a busy hospital environment, creating space
for relaxation and reflection. They bring joy and create a distraction from clinical
care and treatment regimes. Since 1996, Arts in Health at Flinders Medical Centre has been
improving the physical and social environment of the hospital to help create a healthier
healing culture for patients, families, visitors, staff and volunteers.
So, obviously for the patients, it provides a distraction. Hopefully the music
also provides relaxation and a soothing and a healing which can then also support recovery.
So there's lots of evidence around the way that art in a hospital can actually support
a patient's recovery. The patients stay in hospital less time; they need less pain relief;
immune systems are boosted; levels of stress and depression are alleviated.
I look at it from a staff point of view, you know, from one aspect,
and I think it's good for the nursing staff in that it breaks up the day for the nursing
staff to see someone from Arts in Health coming around with the music bowls or just something
totally left field that sort of strikes you and just takes you out of your day and takes
you out of the busy environment. It provides avenues for expression
or for interaction that the routine medical nursing, allied health care, doesn't provide
in a hospital. But what's the most inspiring
thing is when you are actually out on the wards and you see the effect firsthand of
the work that some of the artists are doing. So you see Heather Frahn with her Tibetan
singing bowls actually taking people into states of relaxation.
The rewards of this work is feeling a sense of connectedness with your
community, with my community, and complete strangers, and feeling by the end of my time
with them that they're a friend. That's a beautiful reward. And also to obviously see
the effects of the work, to see people closing their eyes and feeling the effects of the
singing bowls and drifting off to sleep when I might sing them a lullaby at their bed or...
I just had a wonderful time with a 16-year-old who's been through a huge
amount in her life with leukaemia, and she's having to face another transplant, and when
I'm with her it's like, oh, a cup of tea or you know, she's very much taking in her stride
these experiences, and I think, 'What an amazing person!'
Many of the professional artists within the program face challenges every day.
The hospital life is a very unpredictable environment. It is not easy for the artists
to perform their own skills to patients who are sick and to staff workers who are always
busy. There are many challenges that they have to confront and work around.
When you come to the hospital as a musician or as worker, you're confronted
with death, you're confronted with sick people, their families who are suffering, and the
staff who are also quite tired and stressed sometimes, so those are some of the challenges,
too, that make you as a person have to grow and grow spiritually within the work.
I guess I have a very short period of time to engage with the patients,
and for me it's important that I share stories with them that have meaning. So you know,
you've got this random person that turns up, 'I want to share some stories with you', so
it's about working in a short period of time to get to know that person and to try and
sense what's really important for them. I think the challenging things
for the program and also for the artist is the unpredictability of the environment. I
mean, we're an acute care hospital with a large Emergency Department; we're extremely
busy, especially in winter. When Arts in Health come
and they're asking -- they're very sensitive to, you know, which patients would be appropriate
for them to engage with their activities, and I guess the challenging part is for me
to identify those patients. But I do find that they're quite liberal in their understanding,
and they'll actually go and see patients fully knowing that that patient might not be appropriate.
To be sick enough to get into Flinders Medical Centre particularly,
you have to be very sick. So the patients actually on the wards are very sick, and with
that comes the fear of the unknown, fear of diagnosis, fear of intervention, all that
sort of thing, and the Arts in Health program is a way of alleviating some of those negative
emotions, it's a way of interacting with people just on a normal person-to-person basis, that
doesn't involve a lot of the medical interaction type things.
The interaction between the patients, the staff workers and the professional artists
is very important for the Arts in Health program. Without this interaction, the program would
not survive. The interaction is very one-on-one.
Sometimes when you're working on the wards, there's four-bedded bays, and you might go
into a room where there's four patients and they're all laying and resting, and you're
able to work with all of them. But it's always great, too, when you can actually work one-on-one
with a person, and get to speak to them, hear their story, and just sing just for them.
Yes, I think the engagement and interaction with the patients is what
it's all about, and that's what the value is with it.
I really treasure the opportunity to share a moment with people where they can
step into another world and, yes, beyond the world of the hospital, and to live in an imagination.
We had an artist in residence, Rebecca Cambrell, who painted 14 metres of art board in the gallery downstairs over a
period of six weeks to live music. There was a young woman, Becky, who had Down Syndrome,
and she had had a heart attack on the Friday, and she came into hospital and over the weekend
she went into heart failure, and they didn't think that she would live for long. A few
days later she stopped swallowing, and they put a nasogastric tube down and took her to
x-ray, and they took her through the corridor in a wheelchair, and she went past Rebecca
who was painting, and Rebecca instinctively handed her a paintbrush, and she took it and
started painting, and the parents were absolutely convinced the moment she touched that paintbrush
was the moment that she decided to live. And then she just wanted to keep painting with
Rebecca. And we've got some wonderful images of her painting. Rebecca painted in a bride's
dress in the gallery, so it was quite a performance installation.
The Arts in Health program at Flinders Medical Centre has been running for 14 years now,
and it's gone from a position of people being a little bit sceptical about why you have
arts in a hospital to being a position where people accept the program as being part of
the hospital services, to now being in a state where we continually get referrals from staff
on the wards, from social work and allied health and nursing staff: is the art trolley
around? Is Heather in? We've got someone who'd really benefit. So we've now become really
imbedded as part of the hospital fabric. We've had a major redevelopment of the hospital,
so another aspect of the work has been around the environment and arts being not just seen
as paintings on walls but as being seen as a whole development in the design of a building.
That it's the shapes and the colours and the textures around you that influence the way
in which you feel, and if you can actually tune those down to the different areas of
the hospital as to what experiences people are having, it's another way of supporting
people, actually through the physical environment.
The program also supports an Aboriginal Health Unit within the Flinders Medical Centre called Karpa Ngarrattendi. The unit supports
indigenous Australians who need help in either a physical or mental sense.
We do a lot of work with Karpa Ngarrattendi, the Aboriginal Health Unit.
Five per cent of the population here at any time are of indigenous descent, and so we
try and do projects that make those people have a distraction from where they are and
make them feel more comfortable. They are often in here for long periods of time, the
Aboriginal patients, so we have a whole series of activities where we do projects specifically
working with Aboriginal patients. Every person involved in the Arts
in Health program has a memorable story to tell. The stories that are told are inspirational
to hear and are live changing. In particular, Heather Frahn has an inspiring story to tell.
When I first started coming here, there was a woman who had cancer in
her spine, and she was very sick, and had been in hospital for months on end. She had
a beautiful family and they were often there visiting her, and one day I went into this
room and felt that I needed to play my Singing Bowls and the gong that I had at the time,
a Chinese gong, to her. It was the first time I'd ever really spent a one-on-one session
with somebody doing a sound relaxation session. It was so profound, the effect that it had
on her, that she almost went away to another world. When I left the room, she didn't really
know that I'd left because she was quite relaxed and in her own world.
Then a few weeks later when I came back to see her again, she didn't think I was real.
She thought it was all a dream, because it was so magical for her, that experience. And
when I came back, she was saying, 'You're real; oh my God, I can't believe you're real',
and all the nurses were saying to her, 'You're going crazy! That woman was never here.' So,
her family ended up buying her a set of Tibetan Singing Bowls for her to use herself, and
that was fantastic. Unfortunately she passed away. When she did
pass away, her family -- I got to speak to them on the phone, and they just told me how
grateful that she was for seeing me on those few occasions and how much it actually changed
her life, the last weeks of it. Fund-raising, donations, government
grants and sponsorship are what enables this vibrant and inspiring program to have a positive
effect across the whole hospital. I just think it's so important
that hospitals and health care are able to invest in something that really provides the
level of support it does to patients. What I do understand is that,
you know, medicine isn't the only answer; there are other options, and I think this
is a safe other option. If we had it 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, I think we could possibly see much greater reduction in length of stays.
The patients are happier and they're more relaxed, so they get better quicker, and that's
a good thing. It's a program that has lots
of potential, and I think the potential is really just being -- there's a start there
for what could actually happen, and I think it's fantastic that the medical staff here
at Flinders are open to this kind of program growing and benefitting the patients.
The Arts in Health program has the opportunity to bring hope and healing
to everyone in the Flinders Medical Centre by integrating arts within the hospital environment.
The program has so much potential to deliver success in South Australia, Australia and
even around the world.