Hope Was the Biggest Word: 4 Takeaways from the Bridging Visual Arts & Healthcare Symposium

At the close of September’s Bridging Visual Arts & Healthcare Symposium, everyone shared one word that captured what they were leaving with. The biggest word in the word cloud was hope.

After three days of joining virtually, we understood why. Hosted by the Visual Arts in Healthcare Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital, the symposium brought together speakers from Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins, the University of Oxford and more. People shared research, personal stories and practical ways to make room for the arts in healthcare.

We came away with pages of notes. Four themes have stayed with us, along with ideas you might bring into your own week, whether you lead a team, care for patients or simply miss making things.

We are all artists. So where did it go?

Dr. Vivek Murthy, former U.S. Surgeon General, loved the pottery classes he took in high school, even though he never thought of himself as an artist. Medical school and residency eventually crowded art out. On his 30th birthday, he wrote in his diary: "I feel like an artist trapped in a scientist's body."

He found his way back through salsa. During residency at Brigham and Women's, he and a few friends would finish their night shifts around 1 a.m. and head straight to the dance clubs, which closed at 2. That gave them 45 minutes of dancing before sleep.

"In a world where we're constantly in our heads," he said, "I realized being in my body was good."

He ended his conversation with this: "We are all artists. It's only a question of whether we choose to see that, whether we're given permission to express that, and whether we value that in society."

Dr. Daisy Fancourt described how that permission can slip away. A professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Arts and Health, she pointed out that children sing, dance, act things out and make up stories throughout the day. As adults, we lose that ease and begin setting aside "one hour on a Tuesday" for an art hobby.

She’d rather we approach creativity the way we think about five servings of fruit and vegetables or 10,000 steps, making room throughout the day for small "micro moments of creativity."

Other speakers had their own stories of finding a way back. Dr. Laura Tafe, a molecular pathologist at Dartmouth Health, set art aside during medical training and returned to it after some hard life events. She chose collage partly because "it's accessible for everyone."

Ted Meyer, artist in residence at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, spent much of his childhood in the hospital with a rare genetic illness. A volunteer told him that if he didn’t like being there, he could do a drawing about it. He’s been making art ever since.

If you’ve decided you’re "not a creative person," a surgeon general, an epidemiologist and a pathologist offered reasons to reconsider. Creativity can fit into a few minutes of an ordinary day. Giving yourself permission may be the hardest part.

The evidence keeps growing

Dr. Daisy Fancourt’s keynote brought together research on arts engagement and health. Here’s what she shared, with links to published studies where we could find them.

Most of us rarely engage with the arts. Fancourt shared EpiArts Lab findings that only about 1 in 20 U.S. adults report an arts activity on a given day. Four times as many say they ate their vegetables. And only about 1 in 400 visit a museum. . The analysis drew on more than 236,000 people in the American Time Use Survey (UF News).

Regular engagement is linked to lower chronic pain risk. Fancourt said people who regularly engage in arts and culture have a lower risk of developing chronic pain, similar in size to regular physical activity. In one study from her team, adults over 50 who attended cultural events at least every other month had 25% lower odds of developing chronic pain over about a decade (The Journal of Pain, 2018).

It’s also linked to slower biological aging. Fancourt described research linking regular arts engagement to a younger biological age. In her team’s study of 3,556 UK adults, published in May, people who engaged weekly appeared to age about 4% more slowly than those who rarely did (UCL News).

Music therapy matched CBT for anxiety. Fancourt pointed to the first head-to-head trial of music therapy against cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a first-line treatment for anxiety. Music therapy worked just as well.

Health systems are paying attention. Fancourt described a four-year arts on prescription program in Greece, where two trials with nearly 1,000 people living with severe mental illness found reductions in depression and anxiety. In March, Greece formally allowed psychiatrists to prescribe the arts through its national health system (GMS Journal of Arts Therapies). She also said arts and social prescribing programs are active in around 40 countries, 27 countries have integrated the arts into medical curricula, and 76% of U.S. adults say they’d be likely to follow a doctor’s prescription to engage in the arts.

Fancourt was clear that there’s more work to do to understand cause and effect. Most of these studies looked at arts engagement broadly, from reading and concerts to museum visits. Even so, the picture is consistent and getting clearer every year.

Caring for the people who give care

Burnout came up in almost every session. Dr. Nia Jones, Dean of Medicine at North Wales Medical School, shared that Wales’s Chief Medical Officer had recently named two things doctors have lost: the ability to hold uncertainty, and joy.

Some of the most useful ideas came from programs that approach those needs without leading with the word burnout.

A museum visit in every intern’s first week

Brown’s emergency medicine team runs a program with the RISD Museum a few times a year. It’s now part of every new intern’s first week.

Dr. Lauren Allister, the department’s Director of Wellness, explained what makes the setting useful. Getting doctors to talk about how they feel is really hard. Ask them how they feel about something else, such as a work of art, and they often end up talking about how they feel about a lot of things.

The team’s therapist added that people who meet her during a museum session often feel more comfortable reaching out later when they need support.

Something to hold at the University of Virginia

At UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art, Dr. Marcia Day Childress and colleagues host workshops for residents and physicians who come "more for respite and reflection" than skills training.

They don’t talk about burnout directly. Some workshops end with everyone molding beeswax into small vessels "to hold whatever they are holding." With hands busy, she said, the conversations go deep.

Both programs offer a practical starting point for anyone supporting a team. You don’t need to call it a burnout session. Building support into the job from day one can help more people use it. And having something to look at, or something in their hands, can make it easier for people to open up than a direct question about how they’re doing.

Small starts count

Funding, scheduling and buy-in came up in nearly every Q&A. Speakers who had built something lasting kept returning to the same advice: start before it’s perfect.

Dr. Nia Jones built the arts and humanities into North Wales Medical School from its first year. Her advice was clear: "Starting small is not thinking small," and "perfection is our enemy." Starting, she said, is what builds momentum.

She also offered this line: "Creativity probably is a clinical skill. We've just maybe not named it as that."

At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Kamna Balhara and a colleague began their emergency medicine humanities program with a three-page proposal to their department chair. Eight years later, it’s still running on what she called "a shoestring budget."

Ted Meyer’s advice for bringing art into a hospital was even simpler: "Just put up a show." A hallway or a small section of a wall can be enough. Once people see it, more follows.

That leaves room for a first step well before there’s a full program, a budget line or a committee. It could be one lunch hour, one wall or one session. As Dr. Jones put it: "It doesn't need to be perfect. Sometimes it just needs to start."

Back to hope

Near the end of his conversation, Dr. Murthy was asked how he keeps going when the work gets hard. His answer came back to people: "Our hope most reliably comes from each other."

Maybe that’s why hope was the biggest word on the screen at the end. For three days, people from hospitals, medical schools and museums shared what’s working and what they’re still figuring out. It was a hopeful thing to watch.

Thank you to co-chairs Brooke DiGiovanni Evans, Christine Bentley and Joel Katz, the Visual Arts in Healthcare Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and every speaker who shared their work.

If any of this sparks an idea for your team, your unit or your own week, we’d love to hear about it.