Published evidence for the role of participatory art in supporting health and well‐being is growing. The Arts on Prescription model is one vehicle by which participatory art can be delivered. Much of the focus of Arts on Prescription has been on the provision of creative activities for people with mental health needs. This Arts on Prescription program, however, targeted community‐dwelling older people with a wide range of health and wellness needs. Older people were referred to the program by their healthcare practitioner. Professional artists led courses in visual arts, photography, dance and movement, drama, singing, or music. Classes were held weekly for 8–10 weeks, with six to eight participants per class, and culminated with a showing of work or a performance. Program evaluation involved pre‐ and postcourse questionnaires, and focus groups and individual interviews. Evaluation data on 127 participants aged 65 years and older were available for analysis. We found that Arts on Prescription had a positive impact on participants. Quantitative findings revealed a statistically significant improvement in the Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Well‐being Scale (WEMWBS) as well as a statistically significant increase in the level of self‐reported creativity and frequency of creative activities. Qualitative findings indicated that the program provided challenging artistic activities which created a sense of purpose and direction, enabled personal growth and achievement, and empowered participants, in a setting which fostered the development of meaningful relationships with others. This evaluation adds to the evidence base in support of Arts on Prescription by expanding the application of the model to older people with a diverse range of health and wellness needs.
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While patients value engagement concerning their spirituality as a part of holistic healthcare, there is little evidence regarding the preferred way to engage in discussions about spirituality. This study investigated inpatient preferences regarding how they would like spirituality to be raised in the hospital setting. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with inpatients at six hospitals in Sydney, Australia (n = 897), with a subset invited to participate in qualitative interviews (n = 41). There was high approval for all proposed spiritual history prompts (94.0–99.8%). In interviews, the context dictated the appropriateness of discussions. Findings indicated a high level of patient acceptability for discussing spirituality in healthcare. Further research and more detailed analysis is required and proposed to be undertaken.
Sonification is an emerging modality of information representation, the auditory equivalent of visualization employing non-speech sound to display attributes of form, pattern, recurrence and trends in abstract data. Like data-art or visual and auditory art-forms driven by data content directly mapped to their rendering, sonification shares the goal of aesthetic representation (auditory graphing) in a way to better and more accessibly convey the message to broader consumer audiences. Often, the simple re-contextualization of dense abstract data in an auditory graph (or sonification) is sufficient to highlight long-term trends, to hear regularities (patterns) and anomalies in periodicity of time-series data and to assimilate very subtle and fine transformations. Sonification is also optimal for certain working or ambient situations that are visually rich or visually saturated, when we seek to command topical and peripheral attention with relevant cues. Auditory display is also an alternative to visualization for people with visual impairments. Exploring the premise that sonification should be both aesthetic and informative, i.e. listenable, attractive and engaging, this paper summarises the findings of 3 experiments conducted to determine ways to better represent and access dense information mapped on to more than one concurrent stream of information. Specifically, we show evidence that spatialization of informative events coinciding in time can be more clearly distinguished and that timbre (or tone colour / tone quality) characteristics can serve to further reinforce spatial and stream separation. These findings combine to develop comprehensible methods for representing complex data-sets. We consider human cognition, auditory perception and audio reproduction technologies that each influence the ability to display information sonically.
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