“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being” Oscar Wilde

Increasingly, those involved in the education of health care professionals are exploring the creative arts to find ways of encouraging the development of empathy among students.

This conference, which took place last week at York St John University, brought together arts practitioners and educators to share practice, experience and ideas with a view to developing this work.  Tess and I attended.

Most of the workshops addressed the use of film, drama, visual arts and plays to engage people in the stories of other people and to stimulate them to share their own.  There was lots of interesting stuff going on.

On the morning of day 1 two ‘performances’ were shown which were used to educate students on the experience of MS.  One involved a man reading his account of how his father’s MS impacted on the family.  His warmth and feeling for his father shone through.  He ended the story by singing a song.

The second involved an actor (although some in the audience had missed this bit of information) playing the role of a woman with MS whose illness had now resulted in her having to use a wheel chair.  She improvised the telling of her story.  It was (in our opinion) a very good performance.  When this performance is used with students she is hot seated afterwards (in character).  At the end of her story she is introduced as the actor and she steps forward out of her wheelchair.

Also, that evening, we saw a one man play (performed by an actor) about the experience of depression.

So one story was told by the ‘owner’ of that story, another was created and told by an actor as if it was their own and the third was a play (performed with music, lights etc).

Talking to people at the conference, a number of interesting responses emerged:
1. “People should be encouraged to tell their own stories, you don’t need actors to do it.”
2. “Actors shouldn’t portray experiences that they haven’t had directly (e.g. living with a disability, having a mental health problem, being an asylum seeker).”
3. “I hated that play because I didn’t believe for a minute that that actor understood what it felt like to have depression”
4. “I really liked that play because it helped me to see a more positive future for my relative who has depression and who I find it hard to take care of”
5. “I didn’t engage with the man telling his story until he sang that song, his words were written and therefore I’d rather have read them myself”
6. “I found that man’s story far more moving than the story told by the female actor.”

So what sense can we make of all this?  We’ve all been to the theatre and seen plays we’ve hated or loved and whether it’s to do with the acting, or the direction or the writing or the staging we can enjoy arguing about it.  Tess and I saw that one man play and hated it.  Other people saw it and made important connections with it.  So what?

Well, health care systems across the UK work hard to collect patient’s stories with a view to using them to inform staff of the concerns and experiences of patients.  We’re turning to the creative arts not because we want to be entertained but because we’re hoping that they will help health care professionals to develop empathy and a person-centred care practice.

Therefore, we need to be asking ourselves two questions:

1. how should these stories best be told?

2. how can the creative arts be used most effectively in this work?

For Tess and I, this critical analysis of the use of creative arts is what was missing from the conference.  It is easy to entertain, to make people laugh or cry.  But our responsibility as practitioners is to make sure that people learn something from this process.  So how do we learn to use these methods as effectively as possible?  We need to have a debate about it.

What do you think?