Search

The shift towards interest in the arts in healthcare has been concurrent with what we know about the social determinants of health. There are many different ways in which this work is described (arts in health, arts for health, arts and health). Active engagement in the arts is not just restricted to benefits for patients and service users but has also been shown to improve care environments with benefits for staff retention and continuing professional development. Eisner (2004), an educationalist, asserts that the arts have the power to stimulate creative and intuitive thinking beyond text and talk given how we experience the environment through our sensory system during the lifecourse. This helps individuals to articulate their experiences, to reflect on ambiguities and uncertainties in life and often to challenge and transform long-held feelings and attitudes. In this chapter we discuss how arts-based pedagogies facilitates the integrative and social model of health, and has opened the space for creative arts activities in healthcare education. We consider and discuss the potential for introducing and engaging with the ABP in nurse education. Writing from the perspective of our own knowledge and experiences as educators from the UK where we have been utilising novel approaches to education for nursing and social work. This has led us to experiment with the arts as a means of enriching and achieving more critical and activist pedagogies that impact on professional practice (Hafford-Letchfield et al., 2012; Leonard et al., 2016, 2018). Having conducted and evaluated a number of approaches, we will share our own learning and offer the ARTE (activate, research, teach, evaluate) framework. This framework has emerged from our enquiries and helps to conceptualise learning methods which address affective and cognitive domains within holistic approaches. The framework is put forward for potential use in managing the increasing complexity and uncertainty of practice alongside the acquisition of technical knowledge and skills in social work and nursing.

This chapter picks up the study of gender issues within ageing populations. According to OECD statistics, the UK is the loneliest country in Europe and the least likely to report having close friendships or knowing our neighbours (OECD, 2005). The number of people living on their own has doubled since the 1970s, with single-person households now making up a third of all homes. We report on the findings of our examination of some of the factors associated with health and well-being of women living alone in later life using data collected in the ‘Understanding Society’ 2012. This is a nationwide longitudinal survey that captures important information on the life course trajectories of individuals in the UK. By looking at variables associated with health and wellbeing, we have identified some relevant determinants when looking at single older women living alone. The prevalence of living alone during later life varies widely across developed countries, but everywhere its growth has been remarkable in recent decades, even in societies with traditionally strong family ties (Reher and Requena, 2017). Within the increasing trend of single women living alone over time and space, there is a need to adapt and develop more accurate measures and research designs in order to begin to understand the factors impacting on the nature of ageing for those who are living alone. Forming new intimate relationships might be one way of compensating for any loneliness associated with this phenomenon (Carr, 2004).

The literature on social work supervision has consistently documented the impact of the work on the health and wellbeing of individual practitioners and the tensions they experience when mediating organisational demands with the needs of service users. Simultaneously, the quality and content of social work supervision has become increasingly vulnerable to both local and global systemic issues impacting on the profession. It is timely to explore effective short term, self-regulatory methods of support based on short/simple training for professionals. These can be used as a means of complementing and enriching their current supervision experiences and practice. We describe such a method involving an arts-based intervention in which five groups of social work professionals in England (n=30) were invited to explore guided imagery as a tool for reflecting on a challenge or dilemma arising in their everyday practice. Evaluation data was captured from the participants’ pre-workshop questionnaire; visual analyses of the images generated and the social workers narratives and post-workshop evaluation. We discuss the potential application of using visual imagery as a tool to bridge gaps in supervision practice and as a simple pedagogic tool for promoting contemplative processes of learning. Visual imagery can be used to strengthen social workers integration of different demands with their emotional supports and coping strategies.

The phenomenon of friendship and its function and purpose within social work and social care is significantly under-researched. This chapter outlines the function of symbols and ritual in relation to ideals of 'friendships' among young women. It draws principally from a small qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with five women aged 18–25 years during which they discussed their friendships. We discuss key themes from the data analysis and draw out the importance of intimacy in friendships for young women within this stage of the life course. The findings indicated that not only do rituals and symbols create and support internal intimacy, but also constituted practices informed by a cultural ideal of what it means to be a 'friend'. The implications for how social work assessment and interventions takes these into account when working with young people and other service user groups is then explored.