The art of nursing
Build staff members’ assessment skills with a museum partnership
Developing your nurses’ assessment skills regarding changes in patients’ conditions is
essential to ensuring they provide safe, effective care. With the recognition that
assessment is an important part of healthcare and art, a Chicago hospital decided to team
up with a local museum to develop a training program to improve this skill set among its
new graduate nurses.
“To improve assessment skills, we wanted to make this a more interactive program, not
just put them in front of a PowerPoint,” says Randy Ball, RN, MSN, nurse educator in
the center for professional practice and research at the University of Chicago Medical
Center (UCMC). “They all just came out of school; the last thing they want is more
lectures on a PowerPoint.”
Ball and his colleague Rhonda H. Blender, MSN, RN, program director at UCMC,
decided to approach The Art Institute of Chicago. They were interested in using
techniques involved in appreciating art to heighten nurses’ visual assessment, analytical
skills, and questioning abilities as a way to help build their nurses’ patient assessment
skills.
“I listened to what Randy had to address and, because of recent literature, I thought there
may be a wonderful opportunity to utilize the visual arts in helping nurses develop the
assessment skills that would make them more effective in responding to the changing
patient condition,” says Blender.
The result was a 90-minute program called Discerning Eye, led by Sarah E. Alvarez,
assistant director in the department of museum education at The Art Institute. During the
session, nurses are asked to closely examine artworks to engage their senses and increase
their responsiveness to visual cues.
The sessions use the artwork of The Art Institute, such as Monet’s Stacks of Wheat,
Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, and Ivan Albright’s Picture of Dorian Gray.
“Art, like people, comes in all different shapes and sizes,” says Alvarez. “I like to pick
things that have a degree of ambiguity; I want to level that playing field and explore it
together.”
For example, Stacks of Wheat can teach nurses to notice subtle changes. The pictures that
create the piece have similar subject matter, but each have different lighting and
composition. By calling attention to these differences, Alvarez helped nurses enhance
their ability to notice slight changes in condition that can happen to patients between each
bedside visit.
“We say to them, ‘What about this experience can we now bring to the patient care arena
that really amplifies our capacity to discern the changing patient condition?’ ” says
Blender. “The work within the art institute could stand by itself, but what we wanted to
do was make a connection to what it is that enables nurses to do even better when they
encounter patients and their families.”
A huge part of the program is helping nurses realize that people pick up different cues at
different times, whether they’re looking at a painting or a patient, says Blender.
“It shows them, based on works of art, that not everyone notices the same thing at the
same time,” says Blender. “How we bring this back to the bedside is that a senior
clinician may notice something sooner than a new practitioner will, and the first thing a
nurse sees in a new patient room may not be the most important.”
One of the main focuses of Discerning Eye is prioritizing, says Alvarez. “It’s about
making sense of what you see,” she says. “We definitely put a lot of emphasis on the
notion of multiple perspectives, whether it’s physically a different perspective by moving
around a patient and seeing the patient from different angles or the idea that what you’re
seeing isn’t the same as one of your colleagues. They remember their view isn’t the only
view and that other people may notice something else first.”
The emphasis is on nurses to trust their assessment skills and check in with peers to
obtain a fuller view of the patient. “That kind of dialogue and openness is extremely
helpful and beneficial to assessment to both patients and paintings,” Alvarez says.
Positive feedback from participants
The feedback the group is getting through evaluations has been positive.
“In the future, we might want to follow up with some of the nurses later in their practice
to have them reflect on this experience,” says Alvarez.
“I think Sarah and The Art Institute provided excellent slides of the bodies of work in
their collection to bring here,” says Blender. “They made maximum use of the slides. But
I do think that we saw an even heightened appreciation of the intention of the module and
the intention of the work when the participants actually went down to the institute. It
made a difference relating to the quality of the experience—what participants could see,
feel, and discern.” One of the biggest successes of the program is its focus on developing
empathy and sensitivity among its nurses, she adds.
“We’re really living in an age in healthcare where things are becoming more
technologically driven, and yet the needs of humanity are human needs,” Blender says.
“This returns us back to the human needs of patients and families and the sensitivity
surrounding that. I feel very strongly about the need to have this way of approaching
things; otherwise, everything becomes driven by the high-tech part rather than the hightouch part.”
Editor’s note: For more information on the Discerning Eye program, contact Blender at
Rhonda.Blender@uchospitals.edu, Ball at Randiola.Ball@uchospitals.edu, or Alvarez at
salvarez@artic.edu.
Reference
Hooper, N., Hydo, S., Marcyjanik, D., Zorn, C. (2007). “Art as a scaffolding teaching
strategy in baccalaureate nursing education.” International Journal of Nursing Education
Scholarship 4 (1): Article 20.
Source: The Staff Educator, an HCPro, Inc., publication.