Our Nurse in Residence scheme is one small step to piloting this approach and one I hope will inspire future collaborations we haven’t even thought of yet. My vision for museums and galleries of the future is to have health and care professionals on our staff teams…no longer an ‘added extra’ but an integrated part of our workforce. I believe that we need to be brave and bold in our partnerships, collaborations and staffing profiles. Given added urgency by this pandemic, finding new insights, new relevance and new applications for our collections and cultural institutions is work that cannot be done in a vacuum. We’re operating in a world where boundaries are blurring.
#Jawaban wassalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh professional
But what would happen if we placed a healthcare professional in a cultural setting? I believe that galleries and museums need diverse workforces to survive and thrive in the 21st century. We’ve all heard of an artist in residence in a hospital, hospice or medical setting. Over the next twelve months, Jane will be looking at the Barber’s collection through her unique lens and developing ways of using these major works of art to inform community healthcare and enrich medical training. The project’s inaugural Nurse in Residence is Jane Nicol, Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s School of Nursing and a registered nurse who has specialised in palliative and end of life care. If we can make even a small difference to someone’s day through our activity, then we will have done something important and meaningful to support the mental and emotional wellbeing of residents, staff and carers. Through outreach to local care homes we’ll be delivering specially designed virtual gallery tours, live-streamed art workshops and Covid-safe tactile boxes for sharing.
The project’s Death and Dying Community Conversations will use the Barber’s art collection to facilitate digital and pop-up community conversations and explore creative responses around death, dying and bereavement in collaboration with relevant charities, University Hospitals Birmingham and GP practices across the city and student volunteers from the University of Birmingham’s medical school.
With the Covid death toll in the UK now exceeding 100,000, society faces an epidemic of grief, and yet we are ill-equipped to talk about death and dying. Barber Health has four interconnecting strands of activity: a ‘Nurse in Residence’, ‘Death and Dying Community Conversations’, care home outreach and a social prescribing pilot. Thanks to a major grant of £40,000 from the Art Fund’s Respond & Reimagine scheme, we have a unique opportunity to deliver a project that builds on our previous experience of working in this area, but will take the work to new levels and will specifically address Covid impacts by using multi-disciplinary professionalism and community engagement. So here at the Barber we believe we have a responsibility to use our world-class art collection and our engagement skills to bring some of these benefits to those who need them most and help address some of the big issues Covid has both foregrounded and created. Drawing, crafting, making…Grayson’s Art Club…watching a livestreamed play… painting a rainbow and popping it in your window (or dusting off the sewing machine to make NHS bunting as I did!)- whatever it looks like, the value of art and creativity to soothe, inspire, connect and heal in times of crisis has never been clearer. Many of us have felt the benefits of art, culture and creative activity more than ever during these challenging times. What are museums and galleries for? What benefits do they bring to society and what value can museum professionals bring to this new world with its urgent challenges? Most importantly, how can we contribute, even on a small scale, to processes of reconnecting and recovery in our local communities? Barber Health is our response – a new flagship programme which places arts, health and wellbeing at the centre of our engagement activities. As is the case across all areas of professional and personal life, Covid has led to plenty of soul searching. Since March 2020, when museums and galleries were forced to close their doors (and, of course, at the time of writing, they remain shut under the latest lockdown), the cultural sector has adapted and responded in rapid time.
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