Society for the Arts in Healthcare

Arts and Health is a diverse, multidisciplinary field dedicated to transforming health and healing by connecting people with the arts at key moments in
their lives. This field integrates the literary, performing, and visual arts and design into a variety of healthcare and community settings for therapeutic, educational, and expressive purposes.

Areas of focus include:

• Patient Care
• Healthcare Environments
• Caring for Caregivers
• Community Well-being

As an example of the work done by the Society, here's what an attendee at the recent event, National Summit: Arts in Healing for Warriors, had to say:

I reflect back on the National Summit: Arts in Healing for Warriors, with a sense of wonder and awe, first as a nurse, and second as a Veteran serving fellow Veterans. Personal and professional choices have provided me several opportunities to use creative arts as a vehicle for self expression. Bearing witness to the healing power of creative expression compels me to advance the role of healing arts in a world focused primarily on the science of health, under cover of an invisibility cloak called mystery.

Exploring and promoting the use of expressive arts in clinical care and staff development invites its own measure of creativity. Not only does creative expression offer a unique glimpse at who it is we, as health care providers, are caring for, it affords us an opportunity to co-create by virtue of acknowledging and affirming the ‘artist.’ Health care providers often suffer vicariously. Time and attention to the gift of self, expressed creatively, promotes healing among healers, and begs to be included in care for the caregiver. My experience of the Summit reinforced these same principles.

The Summit was masterful in highlighting a wide spectrum of creatively engaging possibilities, complemented by a potpourri of experiences that touched the soul; healing opportunities, no doubt, for souls ‘lost’ to trauma. The conference settings created stages appropriate for both the message and the messengers. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Summit was the contradiction created by considering military culture in the context of creative healing. Who better, however, to lead the way in directing care that is essential, deliberate, and mission driven – healing our wounded soldiers. The Society for Arts in Healthcare facilitated an unprecedented partnership event showcasing healing art in healthcare with creativity that delivered its message beautifully.

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