Tag: Health care

Dorothy Day and Nursing

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From Creative Commons

Dorothy Day is known for her work in social justice, and especially for her co-founding and longtime work with the Catholic Worker Movement. Earlier in my career I worked with the Richmond, Virginia-based Freedom House, modeled after Day’s houses of hospitality. Freedom House, like Day’s original house of hospitality in the Lower East Side of NYC, included a shelter, soup kitchen, laundry and clothing services, counseling and friendship. The staff members of Freedom House lived in voluntary poverty as a mark of solidarity, and as a way to become un-insulated from the realities of poverty and homelessness.

I also knew that Dorothy Day had been a journalist and had been involved with the women’s suffrage movement. She picketed the White House in 1917 as part of the Silent Sentinels’ nonviolent civil disobedience, and was arrested and jailed for her part in the peaceful protest.

But, I had no idea that Dorothy Day was also a nurse. I discovered that fact recently when I read her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (Harper and Row, 1952). In 1918, as WWI and the influenza pandemic raged on, Dorothy wrote to a friend: ‘I hate being Utopian and trying to escape from reality . (,,,) What good am I doing my fellow men? They are sick and there are not enough nurses to care for them. It’s the poor that are suffering. I’ve got to do something.”

So she went to work as a nurse–or a nurse-in-training– at the Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. She writes of this time: “From the beginning I enjoyed the work. (…) My experience there reassured me as to the care one received from the city. It was a care given to citizens, not to paupers. And it was all free.”

In her autobiography, she describes specific patients and hospital wards that were particuarly memorable to her. Two female patients dying near each other in a ward, one a woman of fifty and the other a girl of twenty-two. Of the younger patient she writes, “There was the smell of death around her, I kept thinking, and there was no one to bring her flowers to deaden it.” She moved to a fracture ward. ‘This ward broke me, the work was so hard. (…) One afternoon when I had been cleaning up filth all day, and the perverse patient had again thrown her bedpan out on the floor dirtying my shoes and stockings, I left the ward in tears and sat in the washroom weeping uncontrollably at the ugliness and misery of life.” Day claims that she had a sympathetic nursing supervisor who took her off the difficult ward, “… transferring me to medical where there were fifty patients with influenza.” (I’m not so sure I’d call her supervisor sympathetic.)

We forget how devastating the 1918 flu pandemic was: “This was the time of the ‘flu’ epidemic and the wards were filled and the halls too. Many of the nurses became ill and we were very short-handed. Every night before going off duty there were bodies to be wrapped in sheets and wheeled away to the morgue. When we came on duty in the morning, the night nurse was performing the same grim task.(…) It was hard not to be careless at this time when every day ten or twelve new patients were carried in or walked staggeringly only to fall unconscious as soon as their clothes were taken from them.”

Of burnout and emotional numbing in her work a a nurse, Day writes this: “Nursing was like newspaper work. It was impossible to suffer long over the tragedies which took place every day. One was too close to them to have perspective. They happened too continuously. They weighed on you, gave you a still and subdued feeling, but the very fact that you were continually busy left you no time to brood.” She writes of finding solace and peace outside in the hospital grounds: “I just sat for a brief rest and watched the sparrows and starlings looking for crumbs from the apron pockets of the old women. ”

Dorothy Day worked as a nurse at the hospital for a year, until after the influenza epidemic was over. “Then a longing to write, to be pursuing the career of a journalist which I had chosen for myself, swept over me so that even though I loved the work in the hospital, I felt it was a second choice, and not my vocation. My work was to write and there was no time for that where I was.” She concludes this chapter of her life by writing, “…I had been a good and sympathetic nurse. I knew that I loved the work, and that if I had not had the irresistible urge to write, I would have clung to the profession of nursing as the most noble work (…).”

Nurse Dorothy Day, along with suffragist/activist/radical hospitality Dorothy Day: an inspiration.

In Boom or Bust: Standing in Solidarity

Version 2Seattle is a boom or bust town. Boom times: The timber/logging industry of its early days. The jumping off point for people drawn to the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon. The Boeing surge during WWII. And, since the 1990s and accelerating over the past four or so years, the technology boom with Microsoft and now Amazon leading the way. The bust times in between, including the Boeing Bust of the early 1970s, spurring the famous billboard near the Sea-Tac airport reading, “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights.”

Since its early days Seattle has been a socially progressive place. King County, which includes the City of Seattle, was formed by the Oregon Territorial legislature in 1852. From the beginning, the King County Commissioners were responsible for such things as constructing and maintaining public buildings, collecting taxes, and supporting ‘indigents, paupers, ill, insane, and homeless people living in the county.’ Today, while there is a robust safety net in our community, it is not strong enough. Homelessness in the Seattle area is increasing, with tent cities sprouting up wherever they can, including along the original Skid Road (Yesler Way) in the shadows of Harborview Medical Center as shown in this photo taken late last fall.

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Homeless encampment near Harborview in downtown Seattle. Photo credit: Josephine Ensign/2014.

As the bumperstickers at the beginning of this post proclaim: Healthcare is a human right; housing is health care. They were produced by the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, of which I am a member. The Council recently issued this timely and hopefully provocative-in-a-good way justice statement entitled Standing in Solidarity: In Support of the Movement for Social Justice. It reads:

“The National Health Care for the Homeless Council recognizes that the significant health disparities associated with homelessness are part of a much larger pattern of injustice in the United States. Poverty and structural racism too often are perpetuated and upheld by poor public policies and narrow social opinion, leaving millions of men, women, children, and youth unable to achieve their potential for well-being and success. We stand in solidarity with the growing social movements and supportive jurisdictions that seek to correct underlying social and economic inequities. We understand that our work as health care providers is part of a much larger struggle to attain human and civil rights, to include the rights to housing and health care.

Numerous recent events involving police violence and community responses have reawakened the national consciousness around the failures of our public systems. Rather than focusing on sensationalized moments and ignoring the daily traumatic violence experienced by those living in poverty, we ask that media outlets instead continue to highlight the root causes of these incidents—social disinvestment, racism, and the ongoing, profound inequities in opportunities, as evidenced by the following:

Public policies created current conditions, but the policy-making process can also promote a robust and inclusive society. We call for measures to establish for everyone in our country the rights to health care, housing, and livable incomes. We also call for those in the Health Care for the Homeless community—and others allied with this cause—to continue our work toward public policies that achieve social justice.”

Boots On, For My Father

IMG_1232 - Version 3On Father’s Day, here is a piece I wrote about my father’s last years of life, and his quest to die at home, with his boots on, which he did last fall, despite a whole Southern Gothic region-full of subtext and intrigue. If you haven’t yet read Atul Gawande’s powerful and important book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Metropolitan Books, 2014), I highly recommend it. The following essay, “Home Death,” I wrote appeared in the Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine (Spring 2013).

“Natural death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful. Even at that, it makes a difference if you can achieve it in your own home and not in a public institution.” ~ George Orwell

In his essay “How the Poor Die,” Eric Arthur Blair (pen name George Orwell) describes his month-long stay in a French public hospital in the winter of 1929. He was treated for pneumonia in a crowded open-ward public hospital, where he observed many indigent patients dying under the indifferent care of “slatternly nurses” and doctors and medical students “… with a seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human beings.” He fled the hospital before being discharged, but the hospital was a probable source of the tuberculosis that would later cause his death, at age 46, in a London public hospital.

Like the majority of people in the U.S., my father would rather not die in a hospital—public or private. Studies consistently indicate that more than 80% of patients wish to avoid hospitalization and intensive care treatment during the terminal phase of an illness. In most cases, hospital deaths are considered to be less than ‘good deaths’ because they are not where patients want to die, combined with the high-cost of hospital end-of-life care.

My father would rather die at home with his boots and gardening gloves on, surrounded by family and trusted caregivers. At eighty-nine years old and suffering from the ravages of advanced congestive heart failure, my father is one of the burgeoning number of the ‘very old’ frail elderly facing end-of-life decisions. And I am one of the even larger number of baby boomers approaching retirement while simultaneously helping care for an elderly family member. My father lives in Virginia; I live across the country in Seattle. Nevertheless, my father appointed me his health care proxy. I naively thought that being a nurse practitioner with an advanced degree in public health would help stack the odds in favor of my father having the home death he desires.

I know what it is like when end-of-life care works well. Four years ago I helped my mother have a relatively peaceful home death in hospice. She was eighty-five years old and died of breast and lung cancer. End-of-life predictions are, of course, much more accurate for patients with cancer than they are for patients with congestive heart failure. I had to intervene with her oncologist to stop the chemotherapy that was clearly doing more harm than good. But I expected that. Oncologists are programmed for aggressive treatment and have a difficult time, as the writer Atul Gawande says, letting go. My mother died six weeks after stopping chemotherapy, and two days after learning that her vote helped turn Virginia for Obama. Hers was a good death.

Although I was able to take time off from my job to help my mother in her final illness, my father was her primary home caregiver. Now, with my father living alone, he is hiring caregivers so he can qualify for home hospice. In the past six weeks he has moved through four different health care settings: acute care teaching hospital, nursing home for physical rehabilitation, back to his private home with visiting nursing, and now with home hospice. Besides Medicare, my father has good supplemental private health insurance, and he has sufficient savings to cover out-of-pocket expenses.

Despite my father’s resources, helping him navigate his final days has been a Kafkaesque nightmare tinged with perverse humor. Having worked within the U.S. health care system as a primary care provider for thirty years, I was prepared for the lack of care coordination across health care settings. I was even prepared for his myriad health care providers misplacing his Advance Medical Directives. I keep a scanned copy with me at all times to e-mail or fax it to whichever health care site he’s currently in. But I wasn’t prepared for April Fools’ Day this year.

For transparency and context I should add that I teach health policy to nursing students at a major academic medical center in Seattle. On April Fools’ Day, a Sunday this year, I was in Seattle preparing notes for my upcoming class presentation on patient-centered care. One of my father’s neighbors in Virginia called to tell me my father had skipped church to go to the emergency department of the nearby teaching hospital. He had been complaining of shortness of breath and not feeling well. It takes something serious for my father to miss church.

When I called the hospital to find out his status, the emergency department clerk told me I needed to tell her my father’s “secret HIPAA patient password” before she could even tell me whether he was in the hospital. She added that they strictly enforce this password because the hospital has so many patients involved in gang shootings and domestic violence. She didn’t change her mind when I pointed out that my father was an eighty-eight year old widower and retired Presbyterian minister who had signed his Advance Medical Directive forms appointing me his health care prox in their hospital administrative offices less than a year ago. She said they had no record of it and they had to treat all patients the same, so my only option was to come to the hospital in person. I did make a notation for my health policy class that this interaction was a good example of the need for improved patient-centered care, as well as for more appropriate use of patient privacy rules.

By the time I got through the hospital gatekeepers to be able to talk to my father, a cardiac surgeon had been called down to the emergency department and had convinced him to sign consent forms for a high-risk, high cost, low-to-no-benefit, quasi-experimental transapical arotic valve replacement. Less than six months post-surgery, my father was back in the same teaching hospital for rapidly accelerating heart failure, and I was flying in from Seattle to advocate transferring him to home hospice.

In its current form, our healthcare system conspires against the possibility of older people having a natural, good death at home. While there are pockets of improvement in terms of fewer hospital deaths for the very old, there are accompanying shifts towards more patients seeing ten or more medical specialists in their last six months of life, greater use of intensive care units, and more patients dying in nursing homes. As with my father’s experience, much of the blame falls on teaching hospitals: tenacious places known for medically aggressive treatment. I get the argument that this aggressiveness is what drives medical innovation and makes U.S. high-tech medical care among the best in the world. But when it comes to the care of the very old, that argument does not hold up—unless the elderly are donating their bodies to medical science before they are dead.

According to many studies (reflected in the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care data) the number of teaching hospital beds in a region is associated with a higher percentage of hospital deaths without a concomitant improvement in overall population health. If the primary mission of teaching hospitals is to educate our future health care professionals, what is it we are teaching them about death and end-of-life care? Perhaps it would benefit everyone if we who work in academic medical centers remember that our students will soon be taking care of us in our own final days.

Josephine Ensign, MPH ’92, DrPH ‘96, is a nurse and writer who teaches health policy at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Health Care Bucket Lists

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Bucket list: a list of things you want to accomplish before you die. Derived from the saying, “kick the bucket,” a euphemism for dying–although no one seems to agree on the derivation of “kick the bucket.”

I recently ran across my own bucket list that I wrote when I was twelve years old. I wrote it as part of a seventh grade creative writing assignment. My mother kept all of my childhood writing and presented the packet to me before she died–something for which I am eternally grateful. My short stories about toothbrushes coming to life give me glimpses of my younger self that cannot be accessed through any other medium. Here is my bucket list at age twelve:

  1. Own a pair of sandhill cranes
  2. Have a zoo where all the animals can run free
  3. Have a greenhouse as big as a football field
  4. Learn to ride a unicycle
  5. Go to Australia
  6. Keep an otter
  7. Build my own house over-looking a lake
  8. Write a children’s book

I believe that I wanted to be a writer, a naturalist, or a veterinarian–most definitely not a nurse. My favorite books were (not surprisingly by my bucket list), Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water.

What would my bucket list, my hopes for the future of health care be like? Since I am no longer young and idealistic, my health care bucket list comes out sounding way too jaded and cynical. So I turned to question to my younger and hopefully still idealistic senior nursing students. “What are your hopes for health care?” was my specific in-class reflective writing question to them a week or so ago. I asked them to write out a list of their top ten hopes.

Out of the 140 or so students, the vast majority listed some version of “universal access to quality and affordable health care.” Another frequently listed item was “provision of culturally humble health care,” as well as “eliminate racism in healthcare.” Many included ‘an emphasis on community-based primary health care,” and “more funding for public health.” Improved patient safety efforts, especially through good interprofessional health care team communication and safe nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals, was a top-listed item. Closely related to that was “improve working conditions to reduce nurse burnout.” Improved access to better mental health services (including the astutely stated question “why are mental health units so ugly?”) and reducing stigma for mental illness and substance use issues, were also frequently mentioned. “Improving end-of-life and beginning-of-life care” as a way to improve quality of life as well as better use of our health care dollars was another top choice.

Here are some additional student ‘hopes for health care’ that make my heart sing and that give me more than a bucketful of hope for the future of health care:

  • To see the person, not the illness.
  • To create a nursing image that represents our smarts and not just our compassion (and nurses aren’t asked, “why didn’t you become a doctor?”)
  • To have more nursing involvement in policy change. Use my knowledge of the challenges faced by my patients to inform policy advocacy.
  • To ensure that ‘the least among us’ receives the best care possible, and “that I am courageous and prepared enough to advocate for the least among us.”
  • That we realize our patients have backstories that need to be recognized in order to provide the best care for them.
  • Full scope-of-practice for nurses uniformly across the country.
  • I hope I still have hopes for the health care system.

On Strike

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Red Square and Suzzallo Library, University of Washington. Photo credit: Josephine Ensign/2015.

What would happen if you didn’t show up to work, if you walked out of work, if you went on strike? Would anyone notice? Would anyone suffer? Besides earning a (hopefully ‘living wage’) paycheck and (hopefully) decent benefits including heath insurance, how essential is the work we do? And just how expendable are we?

These questions have been on my mind over the past several weeks as a labor dispute rumbles along at the University of Washington in Seattle where I teach. Our faculty members are not unionized, but our teaching assistants are part of the labor union UAW Local 4121. They just voted (90% in favor) to strike if their union representatives can’t negotiate a new work contract with the university by April 30th. Among the union’s terms is one calling on the university to adhere to the City of Seattle’s new minimum wage ordinance that went into effect at the beginning of this month. They are also asking for better health insurance benefits. Their most recent (and first ever) strike was for fifteen days at the end of the academic year in June 2001. Fortunately, I was not teaching at the time, but I understand that the strike created a problem for final exams and grades. (See Columns: University of Washington Alumni Magazine article “Briefing: First Ever TA Strike Hits UW Campus.”)

By now we are all aware of the escalating cost of a college education. An increasing body of research indicates that the largest contributors to this tuition increase are the expansion of the number of university administrators and their inflated (six and seven digit) salaries. The increase in tuition certainly is not going to increased salaries/benefits for most faculty members or to graduate student employees (nor to improved teaching facilities/see paragraph below). An April 5, 2015 NYT op-ed article by Paul F. Campos, “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much,” is refreshingly direct and clear on these issues.

There are approximately 4,500 teaching and research assistant graduate students who work for the University of Washington. My son is one of them, as is my current and best ever teaching assistant. She helps me keep track of and grade all the weekly writing assignments for the close to 150 senior nursing students in a writing-intensive health policy course. She also helps me do battle with the antiquated A-V classroom equipment. Just last week she helped me avoid being electrocuted by a malevolent, malfunctioning microphone that they had jury-rigged to a large boombox on the podium (because the A-V equipment had completely died). I am (still) here to attest to the fact that teaching assistants are indispensable.

And while union membership has been declining in the U.S. over the past several decades, it has been increasing for healthcare workers, and especially for nurses employed by hospitals. That hospitals, including the supposedly not-for-profit hospitals, are big businesses that run like factories, is a well-established fact. Healthcare reform efforts have placed increasing financial pressures on hospital administrators who typically turn these into ‘lean work’ initiatives for the hospital employees below them. ‘Lean work’ probably has some fancy management-speak definition, but it really means that those lower in the food-chain (such as nurses) run their butts off trying to do more work with far less resources.

As Alana Semuels writes in The Atlantic (“The Little Union that Could” November 3, 2014), the small but growing union National Nurses United (NNU) has been especially effective at battling the Goliaths of healthcare power and at winning many of these battles. NNU has pioneered the use of one-day strikes to pressure hospital administrators to provide nurses with the resources they need, such as safe nurse-to-patient ratios and adequate Ebola safety equipment. When Arnold Schwarzenegger was Governor of California and tried to block a state law that would provide safe nurse staffing levels, the nurses of NNU helped to block the Terminator’s block: California remains the only state to mandate safe nurse (RN)-to-patient ratios in hospitals. Yes! Power to the people/nurses!

Here’s some interesting food for thought: When physicians strike, patient mortality goes down; when nurses strike, patient mortality goes up. A physician colleague of mine always tells my students this when he gives a guest lecture in my health policy course. It always grabs students’ attention and it’s not just a random, sensationalized statement. It is backed by a growing number of studies from the U.S. and from other countries (see below). In healthcare, the work of nurses matters. In higher education, the work of graduate student teaching assistants matters.

****** References:

“Evidence of the Effects of Nurses’ Strikes”  by Jonathan Gruber and Samuel A. Kleiner, National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2010.

“Doctors’ Strikes and Mortality: A Review” by Solveig Cunningham, Kristina Mitechell, KM Venkat Narayan, Salim Yusuf. Social Science and Medicine. 2008. 67:1784-1788.

Seattle Times article “Grad students employed by UW vote to strike if contract talks fail” by Katherine Long, April 22, 2015.)

“UW regents flee as student activists speak up” by Katherine Long, April 8, 2015, Seattle Times.

Spring Blue(s)

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Photo credit: Josephine Ensign, 2015

Why do spring and depression go together? The seasonality of illness is fascinating and is proof that our environment matters quite a lot to our individual and collective/public health. In temperate regions of the world, injuries and drownings go up in the warmer months, and deaths from influenza and carbon-monoxide poisoning go up in the colder months. These make sense. But when we think of depression and suicide risk, most of us would guess that these peak in the fall and winter months–what with decreased hours of sunlight and the stresses of some of the major holidays. In the U.S., September is National Suicide Prevention Month and October is National Depression Awareness Month, and many news reports continue to falsely link higher rates of depression and suicide with fall and early winter.

Yet studies worldwide find that depression and suicide rates peak in late spring and early summer. High pollen counts, increased hours of sunshine, higher temperatures, and even an increase in thunderstorms (ah–that Shakespearean pathetic fallacy!) have been linked to higher rates of depression and suicide. Within psychology and sociology circles, this seasonal link is theorized to be from the fact that people generally have increased social pressures and interactions in the spring, which can increase stress. (see “The Season of Renewal and Suicide” by Brian Palmer, Slate, 12-7-12).

The most current statistics from the CDC on the leading causes of death in the U.S. (for 2013), list suicide (intentional self-harm) as the tenth leading cause of death, with the total number of deaths by suicide as 41,149. (Suicide is the second leading cause of death for young people ages 15-24 years.) This continues the upward climb of suicide deaths in our country since the start of the Great Recession, with the largest increase being in people 45-64 years of age (peak wage-earning years.) With the possible exception of unintentional injuries, such as motor vehicle accidents, suicide is our most preventable form of mortality. And suicide deaths have serious impacts on the family members, friends, co-workers, and care providers who knew and loved the people who killed themselves. Note: they did not ‘commit’ suicide as is still too commonly used; suicide is not a crime or a sin–it is a preventable travesty. Using the term ‘commit suicide’ adds to the already debilitating stigma of mental illness.

So what are interventions that work to help prevent deaths by suicide?

1) Train healthcare providers to screen for depression, drug/alcohol use, bullying at school (for young people), history of adverse childhood events (especially sexual abuse), and suicidal ideation and attempts. In primary care screening for depression and suicide risk (as well as intimate-partner violence), a standard question is “Do you have access to a firearm?” This screening question seems so obvious, as access to a lethal weapon is an important part of the overall risk assessment. Over half of all deaths by suicide are by firearms. But now in Florida that healthcare screening question is illegal for physicians and nurses to ask their patients. (See James Hamblin’s 8-11-14 article in The Atlantic, “The Question Doctors Can’t Ask.” ) And other (mostly Southern, no surprise) states have similar legislative ‘healthcare gag orders’ pending.)

2) Educate the general public about the warning signs of severe depression, problematic drug/alcohol use, and suicide–and give them the proper tools to be able to intervene effectively. Reinforce the fact that talking about suicide in a supportive way does not encourage suicide (just as talking about sex or drug use with adolescents does not encourage them to have sex and use drugs.) An excellent (free and 24/7) resource is the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). They can connect people with local crisis centers and assistance.

3) Implement a community-wide public mental health promotion (and depression/suicide prevention) program. One such model program that is cost-effective and that could be replicated in the U.S., is New Zealand’s All Right? Wellbeing Campaign, a Healthy Christchurch project that is being led by the Mental Health Foundation and the Canterbury District Health Board. As they state, “All Right is a social marketing campaign designed to help us think about our mental health and wellbeing. It’s about helping people realise that they’re not alone, encouraging them to connect with others, and supporting them to boost their wellbeing.” Although targeted at earthquake recovery efforts in the Christchurch area, this public mental health campaign could be most effective at building community resilience before major disasters occur.

My students and I stumbled across the work of the All Right? Wellbeing Campaign while we were in Christchurch last year studying community health. I wrote about it in a series of blog posts, including “New Zealand Postcards: The Allrighties” 2-3-14. Some of our health-focused students ‘brought this home’ to Seattle and started the student-led “What’s Up UW?” community for promoting social and emotional wellbeing.

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From the All Right? Wellbeing Campaign, Christchurch, New Zealand.

 

 

 

The Art of Healing

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“Imago” Collograph/Print, 1970, Ruth Singley Ensign

Art heals, or at least it can, given the ‘right’ art and the right circumstances.

Art is therapeutic. Art therapy, as defined by the American Art Therapy Association is: “…a mental health profession in which clients, facilitated by the art therapist, uses art media, the creative process, and the resulting artwork to explore their feelings, reconcile emotional conflicts, foster self-awareness, manage behavior and addictions, improve reality orientation, reduce anxiety, and increase self-esteem.”

An increasing number of U.S. hospitals have arts programs, which include art therapy, musical performances, and installations of visual art. The nonprofit Center for Health Design has an excellent free resource Guide to Evidence-based Art. I, of course, particularly love this statement in the Guide:  “Perhaps the most prominent pre-cursor to the art initiative in hospitals today is Florence Nightingale’s Notes for Nursing ([1860], 1969) describing the patients’ need for beauty and making the argument that the effect of beauty is not only on the mind, but on the body as well.”

The healing power of art has even made it into the stalwart and conservative Wall Street Journal (see Laura Landro’s article from August 8, 2014 here). Research studies indicate that exposure to art related to nature or representational art with a positive, uplifting message helps calm anxious patients, speeds healing, and reduces the need for pain medication. I assume by ‘nature’ they mean the calm, peaceful side to nature and not the chaotic, destructive, lion eating the lamb side of nature–which is, after all,  just as natural.

Lately, I’ve been visiting Seattle-area hospitals to take in their public art and to write Ekphrasitic poetry with my poet-psychotherapist friend and narrative medicine colleague, Suzanne Edison. Suzanne is the mother of a child with a rare autoimmune disease and she teaches writing workshops with patients, families, and healthcare professionals. Here is one of my favorite pieces of art that Suzanne and I stumbled upon, located at Harborview Medical Center in the Radiology Department waiting room.

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“Journey: Hands” Mixed Media, 1997, Peggy Vanbianchi

The two times in my life when I was hospitalized–when I was thirty, for abdominal surgery for a benign tumor and then when I was forty and was partially paralyzed from lateral myelitis/inflammation of the spine–I remember that there was absolutely no artwork on the walls of my rooms. The rooms were stark and sterile and dark and did nothing to contribute to my healing.

In contrast, I do vividly remember the artwork that surrounded my bed and couch when I convalesced at home after my second hospitalization. These three prints of my mother’s (Ruth Singley Ensign) are the ones that kept me company and that became part of my liminal dream-wake life in the days and weeks it took me to return to full functioning. Only the middle one, “Mountain Quiet,” could be considered a suitable ‘healing piece of art’ according to the Guide to Evidence-based Art. The other two, and especially “Ladder to a Room Apart” (my favorite piece of my mother’s prolific body of artwork) probably would be deemed too abstract and disturbing to be included in any institutionalized healing arts program. Perhaps hospitals could start a ‘lending art’ sort of program for patients and patients’ families to be able to choose their own healing art to display on their walls.

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“My Moon Neither Rises Nor Sets” Etching/Print, 1979, Ruth Singley Ensign
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“Mountain Quiet” Collograph/Print, 1989, Ruth Singley Ensign
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“Ladder to a Room Apart II” Collograph/Print, 1984, Ruth Singley Ensign
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Ruth Singley Ensign, artist (1927-2008). Photo credit: Josephine Ensign, 1977.
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Ruth Singley (Ensign). Artist. Photo credit: Jack Murray, 1942.

 

Hospital Healing Gardens

Sheltering Arms Hospital labyrinth and park. Richmond, Virginia. Photo credit: Josephine Ensign/2014

Our hospitals are bustling, intimidating, drama-filled, miraculous, expensive, technology-driven, antiseptic, and confusing places. Anything that can make them more ‘grounded’ and healing should be a welcome thing.

The first photo here is of the walking meditation outdoor labyrinth and wheelchair accessible park/paracourse that was associated with the (now closed) Sheltering Arms Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. This is where I would go for stress-reduction and perspective-seeking when I worked as a rehab nurse at the hospital (1980s), and then much later when my father was in home hospice nearby.

Paul Farmer, physician, anthropologist, global health activist, and founder of the Harvard-based Partners in Health, says that he has two main markers of quality of health care in a hospital that he visits anywhere in the world. His are not the usual quality of health care indicators those of us who work in health care and health services research think of. For hospitals, these include such things as: 1) timely and effective health care for conditions such as heart attack, 2) lower complications (and deaths) from surgeries, 3) lower hospital-acquired infections, and 4) patient report of good communication with doctors and nurses (see the very useful and consumer-friendly online tool based on national Medicare data, Hospital Compare). No, for Dr. Paul Farmer a hospital’s restrooms and gardens are what reveal its overall quality of care.

The fascinating topic of restrooms I will leave for another time, but hospital gardens are something I want to focus on here.

Modern hospitals trace their roots to the cloistered buildings of religious monastic orders that took in those too poor or disabled to be taken care of in their own homes by family members. These early hospitals were often built around a courtyard with a medicinal/herb garden, fruit trees, and a kitchen garden.

Garden of the Hospital in Arles 1, by Vincent Van Gogh. Public Domain license Wikimedia Commons.

The hospital healing garden shown here was an inner courtyard garden of the psychiatric hospital in southern France where Vincent Van Gogh was a patient. The view is from his hospital room. He also painted his famous series of blue irises from the hospital’s gardens. In letters he wrote to his family, he relayed how these gardens were an important part of his tenuous hold on mental and physical health.

Florence Nightingale knew the importance of nature in hospital reform and redesign. She emphasized the role of fresh air, sunlight, flowers, and of patients being able to see out of the window instead of looking at a wall. “She wrote, ‘I shall never forget the rapture of fever patients over a bunch of bright-coloured flowers’ she noted, adding ‘people say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body too'”(quote from the Wellcome Trust blog post ‘Why every hospital should have a garden,‘ 11-8-13). I wonder what Nightingale would say about our ‘modern’ hospitals banning the delivery of fresh flowers or plants to patients for fear of allergies or mold or whatever it is they fear.

Yesterday I went in search of the healing garden at the University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC) where I work (and where I have been a patient–for a bit more on that see my Medical Maze photo description in Pulse: Voices From the Heart of Medicine 1-23-15 ). I remembered it as an almost shockingly calming and contemplative space near the coffee shop adjacent to the main surgery wing. The UWMC healing garden was a rooftop garden designed by local UW landscape architect Daniel Winterbottom who specializes in healing/restorative gardens. I sought the healing garden in vain, as it was torn down several years ago to make room for yet another wing to this already massive hospital and medical center (at over 6 million square feet of mostly concrete, the UWMC/Health Sciences complex is the world’s largest single university building). The very helpful UWMC information desk staff directed me to this spot (see photo below) as the ‘backup’ healing garden. It appears to be a series of mud puddles with a no smoking sign and smokers happily puffing away. Clearly, there’s much work to be done.

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UWMC mud puddle ‘healing garden.’ Photo credit: Josephine Ensign/2015

Resources:

The Therapeutic Landscape Network has a searchable index ‘Gardens in Healthcare and Related Facilities.’

An excellent (and expensive! see if your local library has/can get a copy) book on the topic is Therapeutic Landscapes: An Evidence-based Approach to Designing Healing Gardens and Restorative Outdoor Spaces, by Clare Cooper Marcus and Naomi Sachs (Wiley: 2013). It includes an extensive collection of case studies of different types of healing and therapeutic gardens associated with hospitals, rehabilitative facilities, nursing homes, and hospices.

Harborview Art Walk and Ekphrasis

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Harborview Medical Center, Seattle Photo: Josephine Ensign/2015

What do art and poetry and Seattle’s largest public hospital have to do with each other? My colleague, poet Suzanne Edison, and I set out together this week on a mission to find possible answers to that question. We spent a half day doing our own art walk through the lovely and eclectic collection of public art at Harborview Medical Center in downtown Seattle. Then we sat in one of the hospital’s street-side cafes facing the Medic One emergency bays, sipped coffee amidst the occasional swirl of red lights and sirens, and wrote Ekphastic poetry in response to pieces of art that particularly moved us.

Our wonderful King County-based arts and culture organization, 4Culture, has a useful webpage with links showing photographs and describing some of the major pieces of art at Harborview. As they state:

“The Public Art Collection at Harborview has been growing since 1977 and is based on the belief that the arts can counterbalance the emotional, psychological, technological and institutional intensities of the medical center by reducing stress and conveying a sense of individual dignity and worth upon all who enter its doors.”

In choosing the artwork for display in public spaces–busy hallways, specialty clinics, and the numerous waiting room areas–careful consideration is given to things like inclusion of a diversity of artists, artistic styles, and themes. Peggy Weiss, who directs the art program at Harborview, explained to me that they have to try and balance having art pieces be interesting and healing across the wide range of patient populations they serve. (See my previous blog post “A Photo Ode to Harborview” from 1-31-15 for another ‘take’ on Harborview and for photos of its outdoors View Park artwork).

I took photographs of pieces of art and of particular spaces inside and outside the main Harborview (old) hospital, being careful to exclude any people in order to respect patient (and staff and patient family member’s) privacy. Here are some photos of art that I found most engaging and moving:

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Artist: Dempsey Bob “The Wolf Helper” 1999 cast bronze and horsehair location: atrium in main hospital. Photo: Josephine Ensign/2015.
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Artist: Sultan Mohamed “Royal Family,” 1997 oil on canvas The placard explains that he was inspired by the saying by Ethiopian elders, “Religious beliefs are an individual right but the country belongs to everyone.” Location: in hallway outside entrance to cafeteria Main hospital.
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Artist: Peggy Vanbianchi “Journey: Hands” Mixed Media Location: waiting room of Radiology/outpatient, second floor of main hospital
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Artist: Peggy Vanbianchi “Journey: Journal” mixed media Location: waiting room of Radiology outpatient department second floor of Main hospital.

This piece, ‘Journal,’ with its collection of enigmatic words, such as ‘refuge,’ ‘passage,’ ‘quest,’ ‘search,’ and ‘restore,’ lent itself to our first writing prompt: Take a word from the journal and write from it. I chose ‘refuge’ and wrote a free form poem that took me in surprising directions. The other writing prompts that we came up with were: 1) Write as if two pieces of art are in conversation, 2) Take one piece of art and write from its perspective, and 3) Have a figure in a piece of art be in conversation with the artist.

My main poem that came out of our art walk/Ekphrastic poetry writing day is titled “Harborview Refuge,” and has somehow manifested itself back into its own piece of art of the same name. Using my black and white photographs on various photo transfers (packing tape and acrylic gel medium), along with bits of my poem written on strips of bandage tape, here is my work-in-progress:

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As you can see from these three photographs included in my mixed-media art piece, I am taken by the Art Deco architecture and details of Harborview’s main hospital, which opened in 1931. The almost Gothic gargoyle-looking figure on the right adorns the top of the pillars at the main entrance to the ‘old hospital,’ next to the emergency department.

Harborview Medical center has a tradition of ‘poetry happens.’ Seattle-based writer Wendy Call was a Harborview writer-in-residence in 2010/2011. She worked on a project Harborview Haiku and American Sentences. As part of her project, Wendy shared her poetry with patients and staff and also encouraged them to write their own haiku/American Sentences.

And for anyone who wants to read some recent examples of ekphrastic poetry (and perhaps be inspired to write/submit your own poem in response to a photograph), take a look at Rattle‘s Ekphrasis Challenge.

The Travelator of Racism

indexA few blog posts ago I wrote about the use of metaphor in health policy, focusing on the Cliff of Health analogy developed by Dr. Camara Jones. (See “Falling off the Funding Cliff of Good Health”). Dr. Jones is a family physician and epidemiologist who until recently was Research Director on Social Determinants of Health and Equity at the CDC in Atlanta. She resigned from that position in December to become President Elect of the American Public Health Association. She also IMG_3541teaches at the Morehouse School of Medicine. This photograph, which I took on Friday this week, shows Dr. Jones on the right with my colleague and epidemiologist Dr. Wendy Barrington.

Dr. Camara Jones was in Seattle to consult with the University of Washington School of Medicine on diversity issues. She gave a riveting (and standing room only) Grand Rounds talk “Achieving Health Equity: Naming, Measuring, and Addressing Racism and Other Systems of Structured Inequity.” And on Friday she talked with School of Nursing students, faculty, and staff about these same issues. In person she is warm, engaging, funny, and a gifted storyteller. As she says, she uses stories–allegories (which are really extended metaphors with a ‘lesson’)–to distill and clarify complex public health concepts and ‘difficult to discuss’ topics like racism. I highly recommend watching her recent (July 10, 2014) TEDxEmory videotaped talk “Allegories on Race and Racism,” in which she tells four stories: 1) Japanese Lanterns: Colored Perceptions, 2) Dual Reality: A Restaurant Sign, 3) Levels of Racism: A Gardner’s Tale, and 4) Life on a Conveyor Belt: Moving to Action. Conveyor belt, or moving walkway, is also called ‘travelator’ by those clever Brits.

The conveyor belt allegory is one of her most recent, and as far as I can tell she has not yet included it in any of her published articles. Dr. Jones said she has extended the ‘conveyor belt of racism’ analogy from the work of Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race, Beverly Tatum (1997). Tatum writes about what it means to be antiracist:

“I sometimes visualize the ongoing cycle of racism as a moving walkway at the airport. Active racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt. The person engaged in active racist behavior has identified with the ideology of White supremacy and is moving with it. Passive racist behavior is equivalent to standing still on the walkway. No overt effort is being made, but the conveyor belt moves the bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking. Some of the bystanders may feel the motion of the conveyor belt, see the active racists ahead of them, and choose to turn around, unwilling to go to the same destination as the White supremacists. But unless they are walking actively in the opposite direction at a speed faster than the conveyor belt- unless they are actively antiracist- they will find themselves carried along with the others” (pp 11-12).

It is highly telling that many of the online quotes of this passage from Tatum’s book conveniently delete both sentences that include ‘White supremacist,’ as if  it is ‘that which cannot be spoken.’ Camara Jones extends the conveyor belt/travelator of racism allegory by pointing out there are three stages of anti-racist action: 1) name it–look for and point out the racism inherent in the conveyor belt; 2) ask ‘how is racism operating here?’–not only walk backwards on the conveyor belt, but seek out the mechanisms and the history behind the building of the conveyor belt; and 3) organize and strategize to act with others who are trying to dismantle the mechanism behind the conveyor belt–to stop it. In her Grand Rounds speech, Dr. Jones pointed out that we have to talk about and understand history, we have to ask ‘how did this problem get to be this way?’ “Often knowing and uncovering the history behind how we got this problem can give us ideas of how to address it.”

I continually struggle to find ways to include meaningful course content and discussions about racism and health in the community health nursing and health politics and policy courses I teach, as well as in my narrative medicine/health humanities courses. Using the allegories on racism developed by Dr. Camara Jones has been among the most effective teaching tools.

If you haven’t done this already, try taking the Implicit Association test on race, available online through Harvard University. Make sure you are well-rested and feeling both left-right hand coordinated and willing to have your world rocked before taking this test!