Home from Home: Building Independence in Community Health Settings
Lead Research Organisation:
Edge Hill University
Department Name: English, History and Creative Writing
Abstract
Home from Home is an Arts & Health project, or creative intervention, that explores the intersection between hospital acute care and social care.
The project team will work with the Local Community Organisation (LCO) in Manchester, which is part of Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) and MFT's Arts & Health team known as Lime. The project will work with both patients and staff to explore the realities of community ward care and open up creative discussions about the lived experience of living and working on the four Manchester Community Wards identified.
These two particular groups - the LCO patients and the LCO staff - have been identified by the PI during a previous British Academy Innovation Fellowship project (exploring embedding the arts into healthcare settings) as hidden area of healthcare that is neither acute nor social care. During discussions with the Human Resources Business Partner who represents the staff of the LCO it became clear that there is a sense of being hidden within the Trust and the wider public not understanding what their role is within the healthcare system. The patients of these wards, whilst well looked after and able to make their rooms homely, are not however at home and many are seeking to get home. However, they are having to wait for community social care (provided by their council, not the healthcare Trust) to be put in place before they can return to their own homes. The patients are often disabled and/or elderly, and therefore cannot live independently. Some of the patients do not leave the community wards again.
Engaging with this patient group therefore gives a voice to a relatively unheard patient group and a staff group who work in a somewhat overlooked healthcare setting.
This project would be a pathfinder project that could lead to further projects working in community healthcare settings. The Head of Nursing for the LCO, the HRBP and the Director of Lime are all supporting and contributing to the project because the need for discussion around this system and the future of community wards such as these in the future is clear. The public may not be aware of the vital work these community wards do at this intersection between health and social care, therefore the creative intervention will see artists, patients and staff come together to create artworks that will explore their lived experience. The artworks will be part of an exhibition that will travel to each of the community wards and a film will be made about the project and the discussion it engenders.
The project team will work with the Local Community Organisation (LCO) in Manchester, which is part of Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) and MFT's Arts & Health team known as Lime. The project will work with both patients and staff to explore the realities of community ward care and open up creative discussions about the lived experience of living and working on the four Manchester Community Wards identified.
These two particular groups - the LCO patients and the LCO staff - have been identified by the PI during a previous British Academy Innovation Fellowship project (exploring embedding the arts into healthcare settings) as hidden area of healthcare that is neither acute nor social care. During discussions with the Human Resources Business Partner who represents the staff of the LCO it became clear that there is a sense of being hidden within the Trust and the wider public not understanding what their role is within the healthcare system. The patients of these wards, whilst well looked after and able to make their rooms homely, are not however at home and many are seeking to get home. However, they are having to wait for community social care (provided by their council, not the healthcare Trust) to be put in place before they can return to their own homes. The patients are often disabled and/or elderly, and therefore cannot live independently. Some of the patients do not leave the community wards again.
Engaging with this patient group therefore gives a voice to a relatively unheard patient group and a staff group who work in a somewhat overlooked healthcare setting.
This project would be a pathfinder project that could lead to further projects working in community healthcare settings. The Head of Nursing for the LCO, the HRBP and the Director of Lime are all supporting and contributing to the project because the need for discussion around this system and the future of community wards such as these in the future is clear. The public may not be aware of the vital work these community wards do at this intersection between health and social care, therefore the creative intervention will see artists, patients and staff come together to create artworks that will explore their lived experience. The artworks will be part of an exhibition that will travel to each of the community wards and a film will be made about the project and the discussion it engenders.
