Abstract
BackgroundQuality in healthcare has many potential meanings and interpretations. The case has been made for conceptualisations of quality that place more emphasis on describing quality and less on measuring it through structured, vertically oriented metrics. Through discussion of an interdisciplinary community arts project we explore and challenge the dominant reductionist meanings of quality in healthcare.DiscussionThe model for structured participatory arts workshops such as ours is ‘art as conversation’. In creating textile art works, women involved in the sewing workshops engaged at a personal level, developing confidence through sharing ideas, experiences and humour. Group discussions built on the self-assurance gained from doing craft work together and talking in a relaxed way with a common purpose, exploring the health themes which were the focus of the art. For example, working on a textile about vitamin D created a framework which stimulated the emergence of a common discourse about different cultural practices around ‘going out in the sun’. These conversations have value as ‘bridging work’, between the culture of medicine, with its current emphasis on lifestyle change to prevent illness, and patients’ life worlds. Such bridges allow for innovation and flexibility to reflect local public health needs and community concerns. They also enable us to view care from a horizontally oriented perspective, so that the interface in which social worlds and the biomedical model meet and interpenetrate is made visible.SummaryThrough this interdisciplinary art project involving academics, health professionals and the local community we have become more sensitised to conceptualising one aspect of health care quality as ensuring a ‘space for the story’ in health care encounters. This space gives precedence to the patient narratives, but acknowledges the importance of enabling clinicians to have time to share stories about care.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12875-015-0233-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Quality in healthcare has many potential meanings and interpretations
At the same time as talking about how we could make easy cheaper meals using tinned oily fish, we looked at the designs and illustrations on sardine tin packaging and understood from our own drawings how these illustrative designs emerged and how we could translate this to our design process for the textile artwork
One example was the provision of visual stimuli to explore everyday access to Vitamin D, leading to discussions in the sewing groups of how this knowledge could be communicated to others through the textiles
Summary
Quality in healthcare has many potential meanings and interpretations. The case has been made for conceptualisations of quality that place more emphasis on describing quality and less on measuring it through structured, vertically oriented metrics. Despite contemporary ‘patient-centred’ healthcare being premised on the bio-psychosocial model, the ‘bio’ aspects are usually foregrounded when healthcare quality is considered, dominating the other elements [2] This reductionist approach means that the role of the clinician as agent of change is ignored, with doctors driven to pigeonhole healthcare activities into discrete tasks that can be measured against explicit, external standards. When biomedical and physical processes become dominant medicine is at risk of becoming dehumanised; the biomedical and the physical process take priority over the quality of human interaction, including the social, psychological and cultural This affects the language we use about healthcare, which is often diminished to the objective, ignoring the narrative and interpretive function of medicine [3,4]. The role of the clinician as agent of change is displaced, with the space for interaction with patients occupied by the language of safety, efficiency and the patient as consumer, representative of the unchallenged hegemony of the market in healthcare
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
