The fourth of a series of public consultation focus groups was held on the 25th August in the Education Centre at the Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Tallaght. The event targeted arts and health practitioners and facilitators operating within the county. Sixteen attended, representing a cross-section of arts and health organisations, arts and health practitioners as well as health service professionals.
The agenda was broad based, focusing on priorities and future needs for the arts and health sector.
The outcome of the facilitated Arts & Health Focus Group discussion is outlined below under a series of themes or headings. These serve to summarise the key priorities and concerns for the cross-section of participants attending the event. The discussion while facilitated, was free-flowing.
‘What role could the arts play in our health services in the county?’ was the original title for the discussion, however it soon became apparent that attendees felt strongly that arts and health should not be only be seen to take place within health service centres but rather has a much broader remit and scope. One which needs to be properly described, documented and advocated for.
Advocacy
•Advocacy on behalf of arts and health is required. An arts and health remit encompasses more than arts opportunities in healthcare settings.
•Arts and health is about general wellbeing – and is important in the community as well as in specific healthcare settings.
•Arts and health offers the opportunity for art to become part of people’s lifestyle – that health professionals would, as part of their professional remit, direct people towards creative opportunities.
•Arts and health can reinforce positive mental health and attitude.
•Expand ideas about what art is and has the capacity to fulfil, combating prejudice and ignorance about the arts generally.
•The new SDCC arts strategy must seek to define and promote a position in relation to arts and health.
Developing Role for Arts and Health Centre @ AMHT
•Have a responsive ear to ideas from outside the hospital walls, from the surrounding communities. Establish an outreach structure and seek to network with local community groups.
•Continue to enhance the experience for those seeking treatment or visiting hospitals; improving the environment – art on the walls, artists working within waiting rooms and on wards etc…
•Acknowledge existing successful programme and extend it to community and home care services.
•Promote best practice in arts and health – advocate and publicise the benefits and breadth of scope of the sector.
•Establish easily accessible information points and an information network.
•Define the objectives and strategy of the programme; monitor and evaluate.
Recognise that arts and health offers both benefits and opportunities for health professionals and staff in healthcare settings.
•Music in the Atrium, children in waiting rooms engaging with arts means children, family members and staff less stressed – also some of the work is exhibited appropriately – enhancing the environment for everyone.
•Establish a staff culture club.
•Exploit opportunities for creative connections between staff, patients and artists.
•Healthcare settings offer an opportunity to engage creatively with families/parents/children – sustaining notions of cultural entitlement.
•In partnership with healthcare professionals seek to develop new ideas about the role of the arts in healthcare and in life.
Cultural entitlement
•Exploit the potential of collaborative practice in order to enhance participation, a sense of ownership and group cohesion.
•Promote and encourage a sense of cultural entitlement amongst the community – inside and out of formal healthcare settings.
•Arts and health advocates are also ambassadors for the arts being part of your life – across the social spectrum.
•Dream the stupid dreams! – the arts and health centre @ AMHT could come to include music rooms, recording facilities, and art and studios. That those in residential or long-term treatment can benefit from ongoing access to top quality creative opportunities in excellent facilities.
Arts and Health & mainstream education•
Include arts and health in training for art teachers and in-service training days. Arts and health is an excellent theme for art teachers – eg in Transition Yr.
•Promote arts and health practice in schools in RAPID areas – a vehicle to promote health, well-being, positive mental health and attitude, participation and empowerment in the mainstream education system.
Creative Arts Therapies•
The creative arts therapies are quite divided from arts and health. There is and should be room for cross-over.
•Ask GPs to consider prescribing a creative therapy as a treatment for depression and other illnesses.
•The creative therapies offer a potential career.
•Art therapists are not yet recognised as a ‘profession’ by the HSE.
Arts and health professionals
•Promote the integration of voluntary and paid arts and health workers within the hospital.
•Advocate for more paid positions for arts and health workers.
Vision for Arts and Health Centre
•The hospital here is like a small town on fare day. People come here with a common purpose ‘health’.
•When you bring art into the hospital – you are bringing art into the community.
•Pathways can be created from here out into the community.
•For people who are in treatment or who are healing and who experience a positive arts and health initiative the process can be an enlightening one – a sort of AA; Artists Anonymous – ‘I used to be a patient but I am an artist now’. This is empowering and life-enhancing.
Networking and information-sharing
•Forger strong links with appropriate arts and community organisations.
•Establish an arts and health database.
•Pursue collaborative projects; seek out intergenerational opportunities of working; youth group involvement..
•Seek to communicate in an arts literate fashion – publicising arts and health practice by visual and other means.
•Local authority and others must develop a pro-active and diverse approach to hearing feedback from diverse communities. Develop an ‘art ear’ consulting without words eg film, visual art etc…
Outcomes:
•Attendees agreed to share contact information.
•It is likely further meetings will be held in association with the new Arts and Health Centre at the Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Tallaght.
•A number of attendees expressed an interest in attending the first Artist’s Forum meeting on 29th September at Rua Red.
Fiona Delaney
Public Consultation Co-ordinator
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