Aesthetic Experience in the Everyday Clinical Work of Healthcare Practitioners

Abstract

Abstract Aesthetic experience may be noticed in routine, habitual, or even brief moments of everyday clinical practice, for instance whilst taking a pulse, listening with a stethoscope, in the clinical touch, reading a medical investigation, seen in a gesture, or even noticed whilst walking down a hospital corridor. Healthcare practitioners can be moved in aesthetic ways in such daily moments as well as by issues of life and death. This chapter describes the nature of a type of aesthetic experience relevant to everyday clinical work. Here ‘aesthetic experience’ refers to sensory perception and the arising imaginative dimension that may be noticed during immersive participation. This includes human sensibilities, emotions, the embodied, the tacit, and the haptic that may all be entwined as lived experience and extend beyond the prosaic. To embrace this complexity, aesthetic experience was explored in a wider study using an innovative arts, practice-based research methodology entitled ‘Connective Aesthetics in Medicine.’ Within this, new experiential participatory processes were designed and shared with healthcare practitioners. A poetic twist was incorporated to slightly defamiliarize everyday clinical actions to activate aesthetic experience for observation. The description of aesthetic experience was built from participant feedback, discussion, and reflections on links with healthcare practice. The researcher’s experience in clinical and arts-based practice was combined with aspects of existing areas of practice and theory where awareness of sensory and imaginal experience was at the core. Aspects of these were adapted and synthesized into the newly designed processes and are discussed with examples. Aesthetic experience was found to be rich in multisensorial and expansive imaginative detail. Awareness of aesthetic experience had the potential to bring greater connection with the self and others in attentive ways and led to links with wider issues in healthcare practice. Such awareness could contribute a resource for enhancing quality in healthcare related to values and humane caregiving alongside the objective evidence base.