Читать книгу The Mental Health and Wellbeing of Healthcare Practitioners - Группа авторов - Страница 18

For the last 15 years I have been running and co‐facilitating this practitioner development course, alongside arts for health consultants, therapists, patient artists and clinician artists, covering the fields of photography, clay work, creative writing, visual art, drama and music. It is an optional course which runs for an eight session or two‐week block and has up to 13 students each time.

The different sessions often run to a similar structure where students:

 witness patient creative work (e.g. songs written by cancer patients),

 hear about the creative process (e.g. music therapy)

 create their own work (e.g. a co‐created song)

 dialogue and reflect with their colleagues.

My introductory session involves considering how we listen to ourselves and how we listen to the other to introduce ideas around voice, ways of seeing, intersubjectivity and reflexivity. In another of the early sessions students are asked to bring in a meaningful object which helps to build group trust and sharing. The aim of these sessions is not so much to teach, as to educate, that is to draw out learning from students, to facilitate engagement with their lived experiences and ways of seeing, to encourage dialogue, exploration and multiple viewing points, helping them to become more aware of their own positioned nature.

A vulnerable leadership [28] approach is taken whereby the facilitator presences themselves as human in the room. Students are invited to articulate group rules – such as confidentiality and respect, and to consider their boundaries and how much they choose to share, given the potential for the creative process to open up inner doors to unexpected depths. Facilitators join in with the exercises to normalise the process and initial exercises are basic and grounding e.g. co‐creative doodling, black pen on bits of paper and passing the papers around. This supports development of a ‘freer ….relationship between gesture and sign’ [29].