What happens when you create the space and time for researchers, clinicians and practitioners to connect and collaborate?
We’ve seen a number of collaborations emerge through the events and activities of the Reimagine Ageing Interdisciplinary Research Network. In this article, we explore one such collaboration that has brought new perspectives into clinical care and informed artistic practice.
Connecting across disciplines
Ram and Garry met at the Reimagine Ageing Showcase in September 2024 when they happened to sit next to each other. After chatting through the day, Garry presented his work as part of the showcase, and Ram saw an opportunity to collaborate.
Ram’s area of expertise is in spinal cord injury, a specialism he stumbled across when he went to work in the rehabilitation unit following his undergraduate medical degree. The work appealed to Ram’s desire to develop holistic treatments, recognising that rehabilitation after spinal cord injury required a whole-body approach.
Garry, an artist, has found himself working more with older adults as he himself has got older but developing art through conversation has always been part of his practice. Garry’s work brings thoughts to life through art, making those thoughts physical. It is that physical representation that can bring recognition and acceptance that can otherwise be difficult to find.
Changing ways of working
Over recent years, the demographics of patients in spinal cord injury units has changed, with an increasing number of older adults. This has brought new challenges including an increasing number of co-morbidities, such as dementia, which along with the psychological impact of spinal cord injury, presents challenging conditions for rehabilitation and patient wellbeing.
When Garry presented his work, Ram saw a clear opportunity to explore how Garry’s approach might support the wellbeing of patients. Garry’s work provides an externalisation of interoception – the sense of the internal state of the body – allowing inner ‘feelings’ to be expressed.
Ram saw that this approach to exploring feelings and emotions, could allow patients to think about and identify themselves in a different way and provide a creative output that could capture the psychological impact of their injury. He thought that this might help support his patients as they sought to recover both mentally and physically from their injury and wondered whether this might address a gap in the recovery process.
Working with patients
Initially Garry started working with patients who were part of an art group at the spinal cord injury unit. The work grew from there.
Despite having previous experience in the area, Garry had to develop a different approach. His initial idea that the pain patients were experiencing could be measured on a 10-point scale, was quickly recognised as problematic – pain felt different for different people and the 10-point scale was too limiting to fully describe the pain.
He needed a different method. In response, he began to build his own measurement tool to not only measure but describe the pain, using different icons and symbols to reflect aspects such as duration or intensity. This tool became fundamental to the conversations with patients, allowing them to recognise themselves before the injury, during treatment, and after rehabilitation. Exploring this narrative became a part of the process between Garry and the patients he worked with, revisiting and redrawing until the picture and the narrative made sense.
The collaboration continues and, as the number of patients increases, Garry and Ram can start to draw out the impact to build a case for art specialism to support medical treatment.
Developing new approaches
Ram has always understood that acceptance of the condition is crucial to recovery, more than the physiological and anatomical effects:
“Patients can have the same injury but very different outcomes based on their outlook, that cannot be quantified using any existing medical model. Use of interoception gives us a way to capture how each person is dealing with their life-changing condition. We don’t have the time and resources to do this medically; I’m now convinced that this creative approach through art is a way to do that. The impact of this work is not only beneficial to the patient by allowing themselves to express better, using non-medical language, but also to their families and to the wider medical community as they are able to better connect with the patient through the artwork.”
For Garry, the collaboration has developed his practice and approach which has led to the development of new projects:
“I had to alter my position quite rapidly to make this work. My previous experience working with medical professionals did not fully equip me to work with hospital patients with a more varied background. I had to think more about how we could visualise the figurative sense of what was being described, using abstraction of form to represent the description of the body. The more I drew figuratively the more patients connected with what I was doing.”
Sharing results and scaling up
Garry and Ram presented their work at the International Spinal Cord Society (ISCoS) Meeting in Sweden and are also working on a publication. Garry is continuing to build on his approach, currently undertaking work with the Department of Gerontology, University of Graz.
For Ram there is work to be done to build capacity within the art group at the spinal cord unit, using a learning pack, developed by Garry, which supports the skills development to deliver this creative method.
Together they are interested in what can be done next and are considering how they might explore partnership opportunities in the next phase of the work.
About the Reimagine Ageing Interdisciplinary Research Network
The Reimagine Ageing Interdisciplinary Research Network develops interdisciplinary research to challenge and promote a positive experience for everyone as they age. Our events and workshops bring together researchers and practitioners, across disciplines and across sectors with an aim to foster the development of new collaborations.
For more information, visit the Reimagine Ageing Interdisciplinary Research Network website or connect on LinkedIn.