Hello, 

welcome to the fourteenth issue of the Flourishing Spaces Newsletter~ a small offering to pause as we approach the summer season.

We aim to connect a growing community committed to re-humanising medicine and education through creativity, reflection, and care.

This isn’t about adding more noise to your inbox but some encouragement, a signpost to something meaningful, and a glimpse into what’s unfolding in our shared landscape.

All previous newsletters can be read here (scroll to the bottom of the page).

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NEWS FROM THE FIELD

This issue of JHH aims to begin making visible what is often unseen or undervalued in contemporary systems of care. Rather than offering a single definition of the human dimension, we bring together multiple perspectives, from patients, students, clinicians and educators, expressed through narrative, dialogue, image, prose and poetry. In doing so, we hope to illuminate different facets of the human dimension operating at the individual but also the system and ecological levels.

This issue touches on our shared humanity in medicine, encountering trauma and suffering, and navigating the emerging presence of artificial intelligence in healthcare.

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One of the many contributions is Dr Sarah Saunders’ poem Bed 4, which exposes how careless language in medical records relating to First Nations people can alienate and diminish our shared humanity.

Here are a few words of her poem: 

alcoholic…malingerer…the gallbladder in bed 4…placement issue… patient…human

Click here to read the rest. 

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Professor Louise Younie writes on the human dimension in medical education with the following subheadings:

1. Understanding relational determinants of health

2. Valuing lived experience as knowledge

3. Learning for holistic, complex and uncertain practice

4. Protecting spaces where meaning can be made

5. Nurturing the clinician as instrument of care

Within her article, artworks by patient-artist Gavin Blench are accompanied by words from his lived experience:

INTRODUCING FLOURISHING SPACES TEAM

Outside of work, she enjoys many creative activities, and has found alignment with this way of thinking and medical practice. 

She is currently working with Louise Younie on creating a human dimension group at Oxford. She has connected with others who are interested in this work, and are optimistic about its impact on future generations of medical students.

Compassion by Ruhkia Johnston

“This piece explores compassion in primary care through the lens of safety within a team. When people feel safe, they ask questions and also contribute ideas without fear of embarrassment or judgment. We (Ruhkia Johnston, Ruth Garand and Manilla Blomfield) even exercised this in the process of making this piece. The three of us, medical students brought together by our GP placement, sat in the car sharing ideas in a ‘stream of consciousness’ conversation and I simply drew my interpretation of the themes that came up.

In our artwork, the brain represents psychological safety. During our placement, we saw this clearly. There was a sense of fluidity, with every member of the team playing an active role, particularly the reception staff, who were essentially the backbone to this mechanism. Their attentiveness and confidence showed us how compassion creates an environment where people feel supported to learn and contribute.

The red thread running through the piece is inspired by the East Asian belief of the Red Thread of Fate, symbolising destined human connection. It may stretch or tangle, but it does not break. In our work, it represents the reciprocal nature of compassion and the way it draws people closer. A union of human connection, intertwining the mind and the heart.

Personally, this project was especially meaningful because it gave me permission to bring together two worlds I had previously kept separate which were medicine and my art practice. In first year, as someone who sometimes struggled to put pen to paper, being able to submit my painting to express myself was liberating. I was surprised to discover that at Barts, artistic expression has a valued place, offering a beautiful way to reflect on our experiences as budding doctors.”

After some interesting conversations with Dr. Joyce Lee and Prof. Louise Younie, I started to recognise this sea of hyperproductivity I was swimming in, where rest is only justified if it can be framed as useful. In this modern neoliberal world, it feels as if we are taught to treat time like something to optimise, to spend wisely, to never waste. Even leisure becomes another task to make it something curated, useful and “wasting time” starts to feel like failure.

I kept thinking about Tomás Aguillar’s writing on leisure, a reading recommendation from my sister. He writes about the kind of morning spent wandering, reading slowly, staring out the window, letting thoughts arrive without forcing them into outcomes. It struck me how difficult that had become, and how necessary. After one Sunday allowing myself to “waste time”, I realised that I hadn’t rested like that in a long while.

I found my most creative side on that Sunday. I felt a sense of resistance to the current echoes of society, and a new-found refusal to let every hour be measured by output. I have a lot more to write on this, it has opened a whole new world of exploring how to recognise the sea we swim in, while finding our own flows, away from the mass currents which feel so difficult to resist.

Sometimes the most creative thing one can do is nothing, and doing it well.

~ Newsletter editor Elle Tallgren