Communicating through COVID: Arts-Based Education for NHS Frontline Workers

Communication between patients and healthcare professionals has undergone drastic and necessary changes since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Doctors, nurses and medical students are facing new challenges daily: adapting to the widespread use of PPE, video consultations, social distancing and limited physical touch.

Healthcare professionals have described the ways in which PPE isolates, exhausts and impedes communication, not to mention the huge toll on their mental health and the myriad other effects of the work rate required to keep pace with everchanging outbreaks. All considered, there is an urgent and clear need for research in this area.

Our multidisciplinary research team work with performers to develop and deliver a programme of training and support for frontline NHS staff who are required to wear PPE for long periods of time while delivering care.

The study also conducts interviews to generate evidence concerning challenges facing healthcare professionals and the efficacy of arts-based approaches in supporting them during the pandemic.

The methodologies developed will be scalable and combined with learning resources and a best practices framework that can be widely shared across the UK.

Through arts intervention, the project aims to better equip healthcare workers to manage both physical discomfort and stress, with the primary goal of improving their own self-care. Performers will also train them to use more compassionate and clearer verbal and non-verbal communication, which has been shown to be an essential element of good patient care, as well as part of an efficient and cost-effective healthcare system.

This is a unique, multidisciplinary partnership between arts organisations, NHS trusts and academics who have been collaborating for decades. The project creates, adapts and tests new methodologies that can subsequently be scaled and disseminated online. The art forms being explored include dance, puppetry and forum theatre.