This document discusses how art can be used for advocacy and social change in healthcare. It begins by noting how art is often seen as static and harmless in clinical spaces, but can also reveal deeper truths and send important messages. It then provides examples of how one patient used street art to advocate for open hospital data and better hygiene practices. The document argues that crowdsourcing can make activism possible and help address gaps like a lack of hospice-themed greeting cards. It ultimately encourages including patients and artists in healthcare committees and conferences to help redefine how medicine communicates.

1. When Art is No Longer
Just a Pretty Picture:
Art for Advocacy and Social Change
A patient activist perspective by Regina Holliday

2. Art.
That’s for kids, right?

3. Art can be “safe.”
It can be contained
within waiting rooms and rolling art carts.
Art can be pinned down upon a sheet of construction paper
Static
Still
A waxwork of emotion.
It can be a moment of process with no intent.
Or it can be more.

4. Art can make clinical spaces “pretty.”
But as any child can tell you,
it can be dangerous to enter candy houses.
Art can be used to
mask the rotten
apple or it can be used
to
reveal it.

5. Writing
on the
Wall.
(or what one widow can
do with a borrowed ladder
an available wall and
$500.00 in paint.)

6. They can Write it on a Wall.
How can an outsider artist,
send a message to us all?

7. Painting Advocacy meets
Social Media
Street art is truly the first global art movement fueled by the Internet.
–Marc and Sara Schiller, Wooster Collective, 2010

8. “The aim of art is to represent not
the outward appearance of things,
but their inward significance.”
~Aristotle

9. This is the painting 73 cents.
This painting, like the internet,
advocates 24 hours a day
and you cannot tell a wall to shut up.

10. Next Steps: Why not paint open access hospital data sets…

11. …in front of said hospital?

12. Why not paint about the need
for better hygiene practices and
then enter that painting in an
online vote competition?

13. Sometimes “blowing a gasket” leads to the best kind of collaborative
disruption. Crowd-funding exists to make the impossible possible….

14. Patient Scholarships
You cancrowd fund in healthcare.

15. Where are the HOSPICE cards?
There is nothing between “Get Well” and “Sympathy”
Where are the faces of the dying and those that love them?

16. #TweetChat
can change
the conversation.
#EOL
#Tedmed
#DWDchat
#hospice

18. #HospiceCards
Become a reality

19. The Walking Gallery

20. The more stickers that are out there the more important it seems.
The more important it seems, the more people want to know what it is.
The more they ask they ask each other.
It gains real power from perceived power.-Shepard Fairey

22. We can redefine expectations of how we communicate
in medicine at every hospital, clinic and conference.

23. Let Patients Speak
We must encourage every committee,
conference and hospital board,
to actively recruit and include patients
in every aspect of the care process from
design to implementation to resolution.
Invite patients and you will include artists,
poets and writers in creating health policy.

24. Are you ready to jump?