Story and Health

Story and Health is a broad term and I bring to it influences from my work as a storyteller, socially-engaged artist, communication skills coach and 10 years of working within the Medical Humanities field. I would add that my work as a producer also feeds into this as thinking through and acting on the out-reach and partnership building, timely communications, practical and legal issues is an important part of working with storytelling in health contexts.

Medical Humanities

For over 10 years I worked with the Medical Humanities teams at Plymouth Medical School PMS and Exeter Medical School EMS. I ran storytelling in health courses in both institutions and with PMS I co-facilitated lectures alongside clinicians where I would bring a creative, interactive or story input to the theme.

With PMS I worked across the academic year on the Creative Approaches to Wellbeing programme in partnership with the Play Therapists from Torbay Hospital. A group of students worked together to create the blue-print a story based intervention to support the work of the play therapists for any age group from 0-18 years old.

  • Example of the audio relaxation one, and the book of the route one.

At EMS I worked with a small group where they each follow their own line of enquiry to research and develop a storytelling in health micro project and learn about non-medicalised approaches.

Example – music one, video game one, plenty of others

Theatre in Health students at Exeter Uni on …

Comedy improv in health settings

Care Homes and older people

Activities coordinator for Moorland Community Caring

Ran regular story and word based activities at a local care home – have examples of poem and story making, conversation generation through word play, poetry and short story reading, storytelling, and sensory stimulation.

Care Home Leadership Programme

Services:

Bespoke workshop and project design for participants and/or staff.

Examples:

Medical Humanities for 10 years at the unis, the courses I ran

Theatre for Health students

Care Homes and activity coordinator

TCAN YP stuff

Stories of Care