Home News & Views The Art of Nursing: Real Partnership Through Art
The Art of Nursing: Real Partnership Through Art
Jolie Goodman, FoNS Lived Experience Co-creation Lead
I spoke at last week’s RCN’s webinar about how the work that I have made as an artist, creative consultant, art workshop facilitator, visual minute taker and animator informs the work that I undertake at FoNS. Last autumn I began working at FoNs as one of the Joint Lived Experience Co-production Leads, as well as continuing to work as a freelance artist.
I am an artist who has worked from a survivor perspective in mental health for over two decades. I identify as a painter making work in series, using both physical and digital medium, often portraits, telling stories.
I make artwork about issues I care deeply about; health is a continuing theme in my work:
![]() This is a portrait of a dear colleague Fey, or very sadly died early in the Pandemic. | ![]() Here I am in a daily drawing series, receiving my first Covid vaccine. |
Soon after using psychiatric services I painted A Portrayal of the Psychiatric System, 30 portraits of 15 people I encountered through becoming a psychiatric service user; fellow users, those involved in my care and members of the Trust Board. These paintings hung in the Maudsley Boardroom for a decade. My experience was very much of being done to and not with. I was also interested in accountability for my in-patient mixed ward experiences.
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I have worked with nurses a lot of the years. Women’s mental health is a passion of mine. This is the cover for the 2008 Informed Gender Practice, mental health acute care that works for women, produced by the Royal College of Nursing. The drawings were inspired by objects women brought to a Southwark Mind conference Women, Resilience: Identity and Staying Well. Some of the items feel dated but all still resonate.
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Recently I made visual minutes and drew about Kelly’s lived experience of homelessness and diabetes, for a project facilitated by Pathway Inclusion Health and funded by the Burdett Trust to improve nursing practice in this area.
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I work at FoNS as one of the two Lived Experience Co-production Leads. I find a helpful way to think about co-production is the Social Model of Disability’s Nothing About Us Without Us. A good question to ask is am I doing with or to?
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The Co-production roles at FoNS are funded by NHS England. The Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism Inpatient Quality Transformation Programme is a bold, new model for the future of care in in-patient settings. Using the Culture of Care Standards, positioned between Wendy and myself and drawn by Leanne Walker,
FoNS is delivering a Leadership Development Programme for Ward Managers to embed the Culture of Care Standards. We are co-producing the content of workshop sessions and are delivering and co-facilitating sessions.
Practically as an artist I like to think of myself as someone who thinks creatively: I draw to capture themes and challenges and ask others to draw, it can be easier to express visually what it’s hard to put into words.
FoNS uses creativity to facilitate learning generating knowledge. I am learning hugely about FoNS’s way of working. It’s active not passive, which being trained in sometimes feel like. With rather than to. It’s personal, with the ward mangers being asked to bring themselves and their understanding of themselves, as leaders now and the leaders they want to develop into.
Creativity is used at FoNS to help those that we are working with to generate knowledge and understanding that can be used to inform action. Those creating the knowledge decide what counts as useful knowledge. There are many creative approaches include painting, drawing, collage, photography, visualisation, movement, drama, dance, music and walks in nature.
I am so delighted to be able to bring both my unique knowledge, my lived experience and my creativity to that work that I do at FoNS.
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