Project: Health Stories
Using digital storytelling to enhance patient care and medical/health professional education was the overarching theme of three projects in the health care sector this year. Women’s College Hospital invited family practice doctors, medical residents and patients to create one-photo digital stories. As we worked together, we explored how storytelling can help bridge divides between doctors and patients, art and science and caring and curing. Staff are now exploring how to integrate digital storytelling into medical resident education as a new tool to promote reflective practice, empathy, listening and creative expression. Also interested in promoting a culture of caring was Mount Royal University in Calgary. Child Studies students were encouraged to reflect on their understandings of care in practice as they created their digital stories, and their professors used the digital stories as data for a larger research project on care. Another researcher, Brenda Gladstone is interested in digital storytelling as a qualitative research tool. She worked with her team at Sick Kids hospital to explore the impact on children when a parent is struggling with their mental health. Brenda is interested in expanding care for the whole family when looking at mental health supports, not just for the individual. Check out her website to learn more about children of parents with mental illness. Our colleagues in the UK have been specializing in digital storytelling within the healthcare sector for over a decade. To find out more, check out Patient Voices or read their new book, Cultivating Compassion.
The knowledge, expertise and professionalism they brought to the project, was immensely reassuring and helpful for us, as researchers with no prior experience of digital storytelling. Even more pivotal to the success of our projects, was the connection Emmy and Jennifer forged with our participants. By cultivating spaces where young people felt supported and comfortable, they were able to effectively guide them in producing digital stories they were proud of.
– Brenda Gladstone, Researcher, Sick Kids Hospital
I loved the workshop. It was a very supportive and safe environment in which to share stories. My son has Addison’s Disease. It gave me a chance to express – in a very powerful and concise way – a frightening experience with the medical system in a time of a crisis. I am so glad that doctors will be able to see this.
– Women’s College Hospital Workshop Participant
Digital storytelling is a powerful arts-based technique that enables medical and other health professional learners to “think outside the box,” and truly explore the “science and art of medicine [healthcare].”
– Women’s College Hospital Staff