So when I made a rather last-minute application to present our carer training work at Aesop’s second Arts & Health Showcase in London, I wasn’t really expecting to succeed in getting one of just 25 slots in the programme. Aesop is a national arts charity that brings together the worlds of arts and health. Last year’s inaugural event focused on mainly performing arts projects that were overtly therapeutic in hospitals and support groups – for example, dance groups for people with dementia or choirs for those with pulmonary health issues.
But what attracted me about the format was Aesop’s request that projects were presented by teams that included a project beneficiary – in other words, it wouldn’t be just me telling the audience that our work was effective, I’d need to find someone we had worked with to back up the claim! When we were confirmed to speak, it was a bit of a challenge to find someone who could and would join me to present our work. Many of the other speakers – as in the year before – were from comparatively well-funded, established charitable projects in healthcare settings, where ‘measurable beneficial outcomes’ were abundant and rapid. Our ‘See Beyond Stroke’ project had trained over 700 carers across a year to make small, achievable changes in their working practices, but our focus was on empathy-building towards patient-centred care, not easy to evidence quickly or easily. The training with our film had been usually delivered in small, hard-pressed care agencies who our team had worked very hard to get involved. We’d gathered great feedback and some extraordinarily insightful evaluations, but getting a trainer to join me in front of an audience to talk about that work is another matter. I decided to call a local care trainer (Ray Mowat, of Lakeland Carers) who’d been an enthusiastic adopter of our project, and luckily he was interested to take part. We collaborated on a Powerpoint that showed both sides of the project (Me – “I had no idea how carers got th eir training!”. Ray – “I’d never heard of Karen’s film until she called our office!”) and travelled to London to join the event at the Guildhall School of Music.
