Art Museum-Based Medical Education: Amy Klein, Laura Morrison, and Gordon Wood

Eric 00:00

Welcome to the GeriPal Podcast. This is Eric Widera.

Alex 00:03

This is Alex Smith.

Eric 00:05

And Alex, who do we have on the podcast with us to talk about? Ooh, I was going to give the intro to talk about art and building connection and meaning in medicine. Who do we have with us?

Alex 00:16

We are delighted to welcome Amy Klein, who is a palliative care doctor and potter, and she’s at the University of Arizona and Banner University Medical center in Tucson, Arizona, where she directs the Palliative Care and Hospice Fellowship. Amy, welcome to the GeriPal Podcast.

Amy 00:33

Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here.

Alex 00:36

And we’re delighted to welcome Laura Morrison, who’s a geriatrician and palliative care doctor at Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut and also directs the Hospice and Pallia Medicine Fellowship there. Laura, welcome to Geripal.

Laura 00:49

Thank you.

Alex 00:50

I think we’ve written about your work. I don’t think we’ve had you on though, have we? Is this your first?

Laura 00:54

Not yet. So delighted to be here.

Alex 00:57

Long overdue. All three of you are overdue. And we’re also delighted to welcome Gordon Wood, who’s a palliative care doctor and photographer. And Gordon is at the Northwestern University in Chicago where he is associate program director for the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship. Gordon, welcome to the GeriPal Podcast.

Gordon 01:16

Excited to be here.

Eric 01:18

So I’m really excited to talk about this, mainly because I have no artistic skills or knowledge, but I’m really interested in that.

Alex 01:25

I’ve seen some of Eric’s drawings.

Eric 01:27

He can attest. But before we do, we always start off with a song request. Amy, I think you have a song request for Alex.

Amy 01:38

I do have a song request. My song request is Vincent by Don McLean.

Eric 01:44

Why did you choose this song?

Amy 01:47

This is a song I loved, actually, growing up. My mom used to play it in the house. And it is a song about Vincent Van Gogh and shares the story about really who he was in his life and talked even about his mental illness, interestingly enough, at a time when it was difficult to talk about it back in the 1970s.

Alex 02:09

Yeah, I first heard this song, I think maybe the first time when I was at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival in college at Michigan, and Chet Atkins played it and he is one of the, you know, pioneers, like a father of finger style guitar, where you play melody and you have chord, bass, chords and bass at the same time. And incredible. Michael Hedges had just given a performance and he came out to watch and he was just in awe Love this song. For those of you listening to the audio only, you get my son Kai playing Hawaiian slack key style guitar with me and those watching on YouTube. Here we go for the live.

Alex 02:54

(singing)

Eric 04:05

This song makes a lot more sense to me now knowing that it’s titled Vincent. It’s about Vincent Van Gogh. I never knew that. See, this is the limitations. I know nothing about art, apparently music, because I did not, I didn’t even know the title of it.

Alex 04:24

We’ll address that on this podcast. Can you use art to teach if you are not artistic yourself?

Eric 04:30

Yeah, and I gotta say I got interested in this. I really wanted this podcast to happen. Alex can attest to that too because I actually went to Tucson, met with Amy and she was talking about her use of museum based education. I forgot. Was it for med students or fellows or both? Amy?

Amy 04:55

Mostly fellows. I’ve done it with our fellowship program for our team and I’ve also done it a little bit for the oncology team as well.

Eric 05:04

So I got excited about it. Amy tried to convince me it was a good idea and I should try it. So I, I actually went home and we are lucky I am a 10 minute walk through some trees to an art museum. The Legion of Honor here brought fellows to do some teaching in the art museum. Knowing I know nothing about art and it was fabulous. I had each of them split up, find one piece that resonated with them about a patient that we were caring for.

They each found a piece, we came together and then we went from piece to piece just talking about what about the art kind of resonated with them and it was great. Like I want to do that more often and I’m wondering like maybe we can go to each of you. I’ll start off with you, Amy. How did you first incorporate kind of art and museum based teaching into, you know, training of medical professionals?

Amy 06:03

This hit me when I was at the Harvard Macy Program for educators in Health Professions. And it was just a small breakout optional session that I went to and it just connected with me like this idea of using art really as another way to talk about difficult Topics because I see that as something that we struggle with is we know how to teach communication and we know how to teach about symptoms and how to manage pain. But like there’s still, still tough things that are hard to talk about.

And so when we did this, we actually started like even doing this online before we could even actually go into a museum because it was still the middle of COVID for us. And we sat down as a team and we looked through these art pieces and talked about like things that were like, find a work of art that resembles like a good death, like what does that mean to you? Or find a work of art that resonates with somebody that you like, a patient that you really struggle with taking care of. And so it was a way for us to connect and talk about like difficult topics that we don’t always feel comfortable talking about in medicine.

Eric 07:21

And it’s interesting because it’s not like a docent led tour of the, the art museum where you learn all about the artist and like you’re giving a prompt and it’s almost like in your scenario, like the art in front of you serves as like a tool to reflect deeper about like perspective taking what like a good death is like all of these really difficult topics. And not necessarily this is what I think the art is trying to say based on my extensive art history knowledge.

Amy 07:53

You don’t have to necessarily be like an art historian or know the details. And I, I mean of course that’s, I think, nice and it gives you another perspective. But I for sure don’t know about those things coming in. I connect with like this visual object in front of me.

Eric 08:09

Yeah. Gordon, if I remember correctly, you had a similar story about how you started incorporating art into training. Is that right? Is it was also through Harvard Macy?

Gordon 08:22

Yeah, yeah. It was probably the same session, Amy, that you went to, although back in 2014 and sort of also thought it spoke to a lot of the issues I was trying to teach fellows about and went back and tried it a bit on my own. I subsequently did what they called and it’s a mouthful, so I wrote it down. The Harvard Macy Art Museum Based Health Professions Education Fellowship.

Eric 08:49

Snappy title.

Gordon 08:50

Yeah, it rolls out the tongue. But I was part of the first class of that back in 2019 and so that was sort of a more intensive training in this. So I’ve been doing it since 2014 and had that extra training in 2019. And I’ve really found it helpful for all the reasons that Amy said there.

Eric 09:07

I want to dive into some of the things that you’re doing, Gordon. But before we do, Laura, I’ll end with you with this. How did you start incorporating this into your training of professionals?

Laura 09:20

It’s always fun to hear everyone’s pathway because there is commonality. I was recruited to Yale to start the brand new Hospice and Palliative medicine fellowship in 2013. And so I was in a really generative space and I had already been thinking about Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship kind of on a national level, about our competencies. And I knew already because it had been so meaningful to me to think about the overlap with the humanities in our training. And our field is so rich partly for that reason. And so I arrived knowing I wanted to really bring in a lot of humanities for our fellows.

And when I arrived, I would say it was inspiration and good fortune. I very quickly, I think, saw an email come across inviting me to go to our art museum in New Haven and see what they were doing as far as this education model for our medical students. I had an experience right away and got to be familiar with the setting and all the museum educators that are at our museum and made those contacts, essentially. We’ve been having sessions since our first class in 2014. We have two workshops a year and gotten to tweak it and play around with it a little bit. It must have been around 2015 or so. Gordon and I have known each other quite a long time, and I think we discovered we had this interest in common. So we started to partner with on thinking about this and building on some other education opportunities around it too. On more national level.

Eric 11:12

Yeah, what I know from the national level is you guys have been doing this at national meetings, Is that right? Bringing in faculty to museums that the national meeting is at?

Laura 11:24

Yeah, we started in 2016 with a group of our peer cohorts in the AAHPM lead program. So we met at the Art Institute of Chicago and had kind of a mini session. And actually a number of them have gone on to bring it to their own settings. But then in 2018, we had the first pre conference at AAHPM at the Boston meeting. And then we had that was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. So that was a huge success and so much fun to create those connections. People were pretty jazzed about it. And then we had a session in 2019 in Orlando where we didn’t go to a museum, but we had a session that was on site on interprofessional uses and interdisciplinary team applications, and that had a huge turnout at that assembly. And all these people were so excited about it. So it’s kept us going. We had a break, obviously for cancellations during COVID And then we’ve done it the last two years in Phoenix and in Denver, and we’re hoping to have it in San Diego as well.

Alex 12:39

This is great. This is like the highbrow alternative to what Eric and I organized, which is the GeriPal Pub Crawl. You all organize an art museum tour in the local city. That’s wonderful.

Laura 12:56

But we love the pub crawl. I mean, I think both parts are critical.

Amy 13:01

I was going to say it sounds like a nice pairing. Like you can go to the art museum one day and the next day you go on the pub crawl. I think that encapsulates it.

Alex 13:10

You probably want to do it in that order and not the opposite order.

Eric 13:14

Why?

Gordon 13:14

It’s a pre con.

Eric 13:17

So I got to ask for the one in Denver that you. Did you bring in faculty to the art museum? What were you hoping to accomplish? And can you describe a little bit of what you actually did? Gord, I’m going to turn to you for that. Sure.

Gordon 13:33

So I think what you’re hoping to accomplish with these activities can vary and sort of, that’s one of the big points, is that you should have some idea of what you’re trying to do. For the one in Denver, it was about sort of finding connection to your colleagues, finding meaning in your work, some self care stuff. And we did an activity called Visual Thinking Strategies where we sort of broke the group up into smaller groups with a facilitator. And you’d go to a piece of work for about 20 minutes and have a facilitated discussion there with a sort of set facilitation method.

Eric 14:13

And was the facilitator another, you know, palliative care faculty or was it somebody from the museum?

Gordon 14:21

In this case, it was palliative care faculty. Laura, myself and some others who have interest in this and have gone through some training. In an ideal world, it’s a partnership with the museum educators, but it varies depending on the abilities of the museum educators at each of your sites and their availability.

Eric 14:37

Okay, I’m going to ask a really naive, probably stupid question. What is a museum educator? This is the second time I’ve heard that word.

Gordon 14:46

Yeah. So many museums have people that have this role and they teach, like use the museum as an educational setting. And a lot of it’s in K through 12. But other professional settings have used some of these strategies. So it’s different than a docent who leads a tour and describes sort of the history of the art. It’s someone who’s using some of these techniques that we are borrowing from them.

Laura 15:13

To add on to that, I think docents, I believe, are often voluntary, but museum educators are, to my understanding, paid employees, highly valued on museum staffs, and often have at least a master’s degree. The one that we’ve worked with some over time from the Harvard Macy program and who. Who worked with us on that first museum session in Boston has, you know, two master’s degrees, one in education and another one and is just, you know, very sophisticated about all of these pedagogical models for education.

Eric 15:53

And do you. Do you have to pay the museum to use these people, or are these just part of the job description that they’re going to be working with groups like yours and K12, as Gordon said.

Laura 16:07

And Amy May comment from her setting. It depends on the setting. At Yale, like you, Eric, we’re so fortunate. We literally walk two blocks and we have two free museums right there. So it’s just super easy. And those museum educators are happy to work with us for free. That’s not always easy. And for, like, our national meetings, we would find a way to compensate them in some way if they were able to participate with us.

Amy 16:41

I’ll say we started out when we partnered with our first museum. We partnered with the local community museum in town in Tucson, which is a fantastic museum. And I’ll say that I didn’t quite have the experience I wanted our first time we did that. And so you might not hit it the first time, but can I ask generally what happened? I mean, I think we had a great session, but what happened was that I think, you know, they had come to expect us. But when you asked, like, do you have to pay people? We still paid for admission. We paid full price for admission. We went to the museum, and even though we’d had a discussion and we’re planning to come there, like, they seemed like they forgot that we were coming, and so we were fine anyway.

But it just seemed like they were not as familiar with working in that way of what we were looking for. And so now we currently are in planning of actually going in about two weeks from now to our local museum here at the University of Arizona that’s associated with the university, and it’s a much smaller museum and has many more limited exhibits, but, like, very high quality. They have a lot of fantastic work. And I’ve been speaking with their educator who’s there, who feels very much more familiar with a lot of the things that I’M sure we’re going to discuss. And so it seems like it’s a much better fit for us to really go there. And I feel really confident that we’re going to have a much better partnership.

Alex 18:20

And I ask.

Eric 18:21

Go ahead, Alex.

Alex 18:23

This is a. If you were going to ask a question that’s a continuation, you should. Because I was going to ask for a case.

Eric 18:28

I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear. I want to finish off. Because where I left off with Gordon, I asked him, you know, is he using faculty or these educators? He uses faculty for this session at hpm. What did you actually do again? Because we never finished that part off.

Gordon 18:44

Yeah. So we started with one piece, spent about 20 minutes or so looking at it closely.

Eric 18:49

Twenty minutes?

Gordon 18:51

Yeah. @ one piece, which is something that most people haven’t done.

Alex 18:56

In silence.

Gordon 18:58

No, there’s a sort of a Facilitate discussion where you sort of. There’s like three questions in this VTS Visual Thinking Strategies method, where you ask what’s going on this. In this picture, what do you see that makes you say that? And what more can we find? And then you do as a facilitator, some paraphrasing and guiding of the group discussion. And people sort of get this deeper understanding the longer they look and the longer they hear from other people. And then there’s sort of obvious parallels to our work in medicine, where our team brings in different perspectives and we see a situation more deeply if we look more closely.

So we use that as sort of a grounding exercise. And then we did something similar. It sounds like what you did, Eric, which is called a personal responses to her, where we had some prompts that we handed out and they went and found art that spoke to their life, you know, outside of medicine or a challenging part of their job or something that allowed people to sort of reflect and share and build some of that connection and meaning. I don’t know what you’d add to that, Laura.

Laura 20:03

I think that’s a great description. We have found those exercises to just have so much richness with really any group. And I mean, it’s always. No matter how experienced or comfortable you are with art, I mean, just taking that time to pause and even I would just back up even from that. These opportunities just to walk into the museum space, that hidden curriculum component is there as well. And so there’s always this.

Eric 20:33

What part of that? Because I got to say that my biggest issue with museums, I visit a lot of museums. It’s kind of like the opposite of what Gordon was describing with the 20 minutes with one piece. Like you walk around, you see an overload of tons of pictures. You’re not spending much time with any one of them. You’re not 100% sure what you’re looking at with some of it.

Gordon 20:54

It’s the Ferris Bueller model, right?

Eric 20:56

It is, right. I was actually just at in Chicago, went to the museum, like looked at all the stuff and I got to say, I went with Paul Tatum. For those who don’t know, Paul Tatum, a great guy, knows a ton about art, but he did this really wonderful thing. Like all of us. I went with my 16 year old kid, my wife, I was kind of done. And he’s all, we’ll go into four rooms. Each of us is going to pick one thing in one room. So somebody has that room and you have to say, why did you pick this thing? And all of a sudden it magically transformed the museum into like, it’s a little bit of a treasure hunt. But also there was some meaning now between, for all of this stuff that we were looking at and we’re incorporating our meaning into. Completely changed the way I thought about that museum. So, Laura, when you say like walking into the museum, my kids say, why.

Alex 21:49

Is it that gravity is heavier in museums than outside a museum?

Eric 21:55

Time moves slower.

Alex 21:58

They just have to. You’re attracted to benches, to sit down.

Laura 22:02

Well, you know, obviously you have to respect each and every person’s individual experience. But I think as an educator, you’re hoping that by giving the opportunity for your fellows, for instance, to just step out of the hospital or out of the clinic into this other space, gives them a chance to transition, take a little stock in how they’re feeling physically maybe and breathe differently. Now you may feel it’s heavier in a museum. I tend to feel like there’s more space. But you know, again, everyone may experience it differently, but you know, the number one thing is just to switch the environment, the learning environment. And then as Gordon and Amy have both mentioned, I mean, it’s really about connection and meaning. So, you know, who’s to say what connection is made by each person? But by sending you into a room and giving you this space to choose something that you connect to and then share if you’re comfortable, that’s kind of really where the richness is, at least in my experience.

Amy 23:15

And I also think that, you know, there is that feeling when you go through museums, like, I just got to see everything and there’s like a little bit of that confusion, like, oh, I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what is happening in that. In that painting. And I think the really interesting thing about doing this is, like, you dive deeper into that. Right. Like, there is that sense of, I don’t know what this means. Okay. Like, let me sit with that for a moment. Like, is there a connection with this that I can find? And my first thought is, I don’t know what the artist is trying to say, but what do I take from this piece in this moment that has a connection with me or that connects in some way? Or, like, if you’re thinking about what Gordon was describing with visual thinking strategies, like, what does this mean? Like, how can I explore this and spend some time with this piece of art that maybe there isn’t a clear story that I can take right away, but can I dive into that a little bit more? And I think that very much relates to what we do in medicine. Right. Like, we see that all the time.

Eric 24:21

And am I okay if there’s no answer, if there’s ambiguity?

Laura 24:26

That’s actually one of the findings in some of the studies that have been done is people have even in, I think, sort of free text responses, said, you know, I found myself getting more comfortable with uncertainty. But sometimes it’s also the specific learning objective is to help people really dive into that uncertainty a bit more.

Gordon 24:49

So, yeah, there’s a tolerance for ambiguity scale, believe it or not. So.

Eric 24:53

Really?

Gordon 24:54

Yeah.

Eric 24:56

I feel like mine changes every day, maybe every. Every half an hour, every podcast. Yeah. Speaking of which, Alex, I’ll let you ask your question.

Alex 25:06

So I’d love for, like, part of the richness of this. Like, what will convince our listeners are stories. Right. Like, this experience was transformative for me or for one of the people I was taking through the museum. And could we each just tell such a story? I’ll go first. One of my mentees, Ashwin Kothwal, who’s been on this podcast many times, geriatrician, palliative care doc, studies loneliness and social isolation. And I remember seeing, like, a series of Edward Hopper paintings about, like, the. That just captured visually the loneliness and isolation of modern life. You know, like, woman sitting in a cafe, you know, shot through the window, sitting by herself. And just the mood, the way, the empty space around her. And it captured so well that experience, that emotion, it just drove it home to me, you know?

Right. In, like, a way that a dry manuscript might not and animates it. It brings it to life. It makes it real by evoking that. That sensibility, that’s one for me. I did. Do we? Eric and I did a retreat where we had somebody guide us through one of these paintings using those questions you mentioned. Gordon, what’s going on in this painting? What do you see that makes you say that? And what more can you find? And at the beginning of that session, I thought it was a guy eating a hot dog. And by the end, it was like an incredibly rich painting with this whole history and whatever. I was just blown away. So those are my two examples. Who wants to go next? Just dive in.

Amy 26:43

I’ll share that. When we went last, we went last year as a team and as a palliative care team. And we ended the day really with asking the team for everybody to go through anywhere in the museum. We gave people some time, and we asked them to find a work of art that really resonated with how they were feeling at this moment in their life. And part of it was really, I think everybody has their individual struggles and pieces. And I remember, for me personally, I was going through and I wasn’t connecting with a lot of things for where I was at that moment. And then all of a sudden, I saw this painting of a woman who was sitting on a bench, and she looked like she was just waiting.

And I remember just feeling so deeply connected to that at that moment. Cause I felt like, oh, my gosh, that’s me right now. I’m just sitting on this bench in my life. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. She looked like she was just kind of lost. She looked like she was put together and just kind of waiting for the next thing and not knowing what was gonna happen. And what was interesting was I felt very connected with that. But then when we went through and shared our experience as a team going around, I think it really helped my team feel much more deeply connected to where I was at, which is something that I hadn’t been able to, like, put a word to and really talk about and talk about that experience of how I was feeling.

And so I think it really did have that sense of bringing us together and building us as a team, which was so much more helpful for me. And we could talk about it afterward. Like, we were able to come back and talk about it as a team, like, oh, I saw this. Or, oh, we saw this. Or, oh, yes. Let me share more about this story that we shared in the museum. And so I think it really helped us build a connection as a team, which I felt very deeply.

Alex 28:52

That’s amazing. And it speaks to, like, how this operates on so many levels. There’s a little bit of the Sherlock’s Holmesy, like, what’s going on in this painting, which is fun. And then there’s also. So it’s like the individual interacting with the painting and then the group trying to puzzle it out. But also this, like, across the group experience and sharing of understanding and emotion and team building, as you’re saying, Amy, that’s great.

Eric 29:18

All right. Who’s that?

Gordon 29:19

I might sort of build off that, because what I thought of as similar is. So every year we bring all the fellows from what’s called the Regional Fellows Conference in Chicago. So, and we’re lucky in Chicago that the fellows from Rush Strohr and University of Chicago and Northwestern get together sort of for monthly didactics. And so we bring about 12 fellows at the start of the year in August to the museum for one of these sessions. And it’s sort of every year now, we see this phenomenon happen where they. They don’t really know each other by August, and they’re, you know, still trying to figure out everything. And then they sort of looking at them before the session and then after the session is just amazing.

And they say this in their reflections about how they sort of got to know each other on a much deeper level, and they feel so much more connected as a group. And, you know, I think that’s one of our main goals and one of what gives us joy in medicine and sort of the connections that we have, like Laura and I working on this for so long, so that they’re sort of starting to build these connections. And my hope is that that persists through time for them. But it’s just that change. And I’ve heard Jane Delina Thomas talk about that with their Harvard Interprofessional Program, too, where it sort of brings their team together, knocks down all the hierarchy between the different groups, and does something really magical.

Laura 30:46

Yeah. And similarly, but a little different in our group, we have initially we just had two fellows, and I would, you know, try to encourage some of our team members to come as well. Now we have three. And occasionally we still have team members, but this last year we do our first one in the first week or two of orientation. So they don’t know each other that well yet. And recently I’ve been asking on the personal response tour part, can you.

Eric 31:18

That’s when they pick a picture and then they come back to talk about it.

Laura 31:22

So I give them the prompt of select find. Browse in this area. Find a piece of art that speaks to you about your path to Palliative care fellowship. What brought you here? They share those stories. But one year, the fellows just were even more reflective, I guess, than usual. And we had tears for multiple people. And really speaking about personal losses, their storytelling, a lot of sharing about really what had brought them to today. And it was just really meaningful. So I think speaking to one of the opportunities in this space is the emotion. And that’s also one of those areas to be a bit cautious, because when we lead these sessions, we really, we need to be prepared. Someone could also, of course, have a challenging response or be activated in a negative way.

Eric 32:31

Well, I feel like as faculty and educators, like. Like we see that. We see it in the hospital. Like, we. We should be managing that in the hospital. I wonder, like, how much art background do you need to, like, if Alex is talking about this man eating a hot dog and, you know, all these different meanings, but it’s actually like an ad for the cafeteria hot dog. Like, does. Does that matter at all? Like, how much do you actually need to know about the art and how important is it that you include, like, the museum’s educator?

Gordon 33:08

So I would say that the training that I think is helpful is more about the education than about the art. So, like, the Harvard Macy Fellowship thing that I did was not at all about art history. It was about how to do this, visual thinking strategies and how to introduce people to the museum and how to manage some of these things as they come up, and how to match your activities that you choose to the objectives that you have. And so none of it was about, like, art history.

Laura 33:36

And in fact, I would add, when we usually start a session, one of the sort of important context setting things is to let everyone know who’s participating, that you don’t need to be an art expert to do this. You know, if you’ve never been in an art museum before, this is fine, you know, welcome. You don’t have to be totally comfortable being here either. So, you know, this is just about an experience to create connection.

Eric 34:04

Yeah, that’s how Amy convinced me to do it or to try it out, actually don’t need to know anything about.

Amy 34:11

Art, which is good, because I don’t know anything about art for the most part. But we had people in our group who do know a lot about art, who are very comfortable, who, you know, can speak to this piece that they recognize. And we have people who absolutely know nothing and have really never been in an art museum before. And so I think you can come from a lot of different backgrounds. And even as a facilitator you don’t have to necessarily be an art historian to try this.

Eric 34:43

Yeah.

Alex 34:45

Can I go back to something Laura said about the tears and the strong emotions that were evoked when you had newly minted palliative care? Fellows talk about their journey to palliative care and that there is sort of a wounded healer archetype of people who often go into palliative care who have these wounds and stories that might be opened up in a public setting. In a public setting? Yes. With people they don’t know very well.

Eric 35:09

But even random public people all around you.

Gordon 35:12

Right.

Eric 35:12

Like this is not a private. They didn’t close the museum for you.

Alex 35:16

Yes. Are these kind of the risks and potential harms we were talking about a little bit before we started the podcast? That there might be some risks and harms to this exercise was stunning to me. I hadn’t considered that. You go to a museum and look at art, how dangerous can that be? More thoughts about that.

Laura 35:38

Yeah, I know others may want to add to it. I think, as Gordon was saying, the role of a museum educator can be helpful or even having a co facilitator. But I’ve run quite a few of these sessions just myself when our museum educator hasn’t been available. So, I mean, I think it’s doable, but the main thing is just to have that awareness. I think people can get really excited about, oh, this sounds so cool. And it’s just about realizing that it’s the whole human experience. Right. And there’s this potential for people to be activated.

And I think especially one of the really wonderful opportunities around these art teaching spaces is that we can explore biases and racism and classism and all these challenging tensions in our society right now. But those are sensitive discussions as well. So even how people share what they observe in front of them in a piece can potentially not maybe sit well with someone who’s next to them. So it can be quite a sensitive space. And it’s not like any of us are really experts at handling everything that could happen, but it’s about that awareness and at least being kind of set to be looking for things that could pop up ahead.

Eric 37:09

What do you think, Gordon?

Gordon 37:11

Yeah, I was just going to say I think the other piece of that is sort of the setup that we do a lot of sort of work up front to sort of set up the activity and what it may, you know, it may bring up things and the. And sort of try to create a safe space. So there’s the sort of managing it if it happens and also the setup.

Eric 37:31

So let me ask you this, Gordon, because what I did for my. So Amy got me really interested in this. I was really scared. I thought the risks and harms were to me, like, people were going to think I am a terrible faculty in palliative care, remove me from any component of the fellowship, and people would point it, laugh at me, at my lack of knowledge about any of this. But it actually turned out really well. So actually, I looked up some of the curriculum. I figured out, like, the ones I felt like I can do. Like, what’s it called again? When you go around, you pick an item.

Gordon 38:02

Personal Responses Tour.

Eric 38:03

Personal Responses Tour. I did a prompt. We had people go around. We recombined prompt. Again, Eric, was find a piece of art that resonated with you because it reminded you of a patient that you cared for or a challenging situation. It was kind of a. I would probably refine that a little bit more next time. But it worked really well. The only downside is the fellows really wanted to go to the cafeteria and get a piece of cake in between, but the cafeteria was closed. Next time I’ll make sure it’s open. But, like, was there any harm that I should be thinking about before I did that? Because if I’m going to do it again or if other people are interested in trying, which seemed like a very, like, baby step thing, like this personal response again, I feel like most palliative care providers should be acknowledging emotions and preparing people. Or do you think, no, you actually need more training? I should have done the Harvard Macy very long thing before I jumped into this.

Gordon 39:04

Yeah, I mean, I want to say we’re blessed in our field to have wonderful educators. And as you say, we’re sort of as a field in tune to some of these things. So there’s many people, I think, that can do really well with this. I think the risks are, you know, depending on which activities you choose, some are harder to facilitate than others. Like, the VTS is a little bit harder. So you could.

Eric 39:24

What’s VTS again?

Gordon 39:26

That’s the visual thinking strategies, those three questions, which sounds really simple but is actually a little bit challenging. So you could be an ineffective teacher. But even, like, with something that you did, you know, that could trigger some sort of wounded healer thing like Alex was mentioning, that really brings up a personal story. And there may be a different role that you play, like as a palliative care clinician, if somebody gets that emotional, versus as an educator in a museum.

Eric 39:55

You know, the one thing that felt very, very different to me in the museum is that you’re surrounded by random people. So when emotions come up, you’re not like in a small classroom or you can just talk about it or a one to one. How do you deal with that? You are in a very public setting.

Gordon 40:17

Yeah. So I may be interested to see what Amy and Laura think. But I, I think that, you know, you’ve set it up, your group is, while in a public setting is sort of a little cocoon within that setting. And when I’ve sort of seen it go well, the group is caring for each other and you’re sort of acknowledging, but not doing psychotherapy in the moment and sort of supporting each other and sort of moving on and sort of giving people space to share what they feel comfortable sharing and not pushing where they don’t want to go.

Laura 40:49

I think you might debrief a little bit later. But often I think if you set it up well, people know that it’s safe and I think you kind of move on, you don’t over focus on it and you kind of move on to the next person to share and everyone’s safe. Sorry, Amy, go ahead.

Amy 41:11

No, I was just going to say I think we also, in our field, I think most people come to this with a skill set of truly having that empathy and having a lot of that feeling of connection to people around them. And I would think that a lot of us naturally are paying attention to those things, things, you know, whether you’ve tried to turn it on or not. Like we’re all paying attention to those things at all moments in time. And so I don’t think that when you go into a museum that you’re turning that off. I think that feeling is still there, that paying attention, trying to take care of the people around you. Like, I think a lot of those come very naturally to people really in this field as we see patients as well and as we take care of each other as a team.

Because this is always a team based sport what we do. And so I think a lot of those translate really well when you come together in a group. And I just want to emphasize like what Laura was talking about, like it really gives you. I think art is a way, I mean when I look at art, it’s not about it has to be good. It’s like you’re interpreting this feeling or this story or this topic into really an object, into a thing. And it’s a way to objectify this experience so that we can deal with it. And we have these experiences all the time. That are really hard to deal with. We deal with a lot of suffering. We deal with a lot of terrible experiences our patients are going through. And so I think there’s certainly a little bit of a release in being able to actually just talk about. About it, to put it out there to talk about, like, this other third object and say, like, here’s what I was feeling at that moment when I had this patient experience that I’ve not been able to discuss even from two years ago, which has come up for our group.

Eric 43:04

Okay, Alex, I got a question for you. Next time you’re attending on the PAL of care service, is there anything you want to know, like, if you’re interested in doing this with the fellows from Laura, Amy or Gordon?

Alex 43:16

Yes, I want to know good prompts, and I’ve been writing some down. I don’t think I can do the, you know, you go to one piece of art and say, what’s going on in this painting? What do you see that makes you say that? And what more can you find?

Eric 43:29

That’s the vts. Vts.

Alex 43:32

I prefer the other approaches. And I’ll tell you what I do with my family. When we go on vacation, we’ll go to, like, art stores, you know, and go to galleries, and we’ll say, all right, everybody choose your favorite painting. And on three, we’ll all point to it. And then we all point, and we almost always point at different paintings. And then we say, why? It sounds very similar to what you’ve done. Some other prompts I’ve heard so far are find a piece of art that resonates with you because it reminds you of a patient you’ve cared for or challenging situation. I heard behind a piece of art about the good death. Can you tell me other prompts that are good to get people going in this activity?

Laura 44:11

The possibilities are kind of endless, I think. You know, it’s just. You can ask, you know, is there one that resonates with you about a joyful patient interaction you had or a patient where you had a deep connection? The challenging patient situation or a challenge in the field for you is another one. I liked what Gordon, the one Gordon mentioned before about, you know, your life outside of palliative care, something that speaks to you about that?

Amy 44:46

I think one of the ones that we did at the Denver session during the pre conference was find a piece of art that makes you think about community. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be something deep or intense. It can be very broad and open. And I think it kind of depends on like, what are your objectives for that session? And they can really vary. They can be based on team building. They can be based on, like, just exploring as. As kind of what community or meaning is or joy in inpatient care. You know, they can be a lot of different things.

Eric 45:23

And, Gordon, that kind of goes to what you were saying earlier, thinking about kind of like, why are you doing this? What’s the objective? That educational curriculum part, like, it’s a curriculum. You have to think about that before you go. Is that right? Exactly.

Gordon 45:37

Yeah. I mean, if you’re. You might be thinking about sort of the impact of racism or something like that, and you might have prompts about, you know, find a piece of work that speaks to the impact of racism and palliative care or something like that. And so you have to really think, what am I trying to get out of this session? And there are a slew of other activities. So it’s not just these two that we’ve mentioned, but you want to fit the activity and the prompts and everything to what you’re trying to achieve.

Eric 46:04

Wonderful. Well, Laura, Amy, Gordon, thanks for being on this podcast, but before we end, we’re going to do a little bit more Starry, Starry Night. Vincent is the actual title. I always thought it was Starry, Starry Night, so I thought so, too.

Alex 46:21

I still accidentally look it up that way, even though I knew it was titled Vincent. Here’s a little more.

Alex 46:31

(singing)

Eric 47:41

Fantastic. Completely different idea what that song is. Thank you, Amy, for picking it. Laura, Gordon, thanks for joining us on this podcast.

Laura 47:49

Thank you.

Amy 47:50

Thank you.

Gordon 47:51

Thanks for having us.

Eric 47:52

And thank you to all of our listeners for your continued support.

This episode is not CME eligible.