This is the fourth in a five-part series examining the role of art in health care.
Imagine a world where creativity is prescribed alongside medicine – where artists collaborate with doctors to heal body, mind and spirit. What if the next time you entered a hospital, your care plan included both a treatment protocol and a palette of creative expression?
Interprofessional team-based care is the foundation of holistic care for patients and their families. By bringing together professionals with different expertise, health-care teams can address the many physical, emotional and social aspects of a person’s health.
But to strengthen and sustain our struggling health systems, we must further cross-sector tactics to respond to emergent needs. This shift calls not only for innovation, but for unexpected collaborations, including art and artists, inviting them into the realm of health and healing.
What if you were admitted to a hospital and received care from an artist as part of your care team? You might be invited into bilateral drawing to support mobility, reflective writing to shape an illness narrative, or embodied gestures to awaken unfamiliar muscles. You might find yourself humming along to musical tones that gently ease anxiety, meet a new friend in a collective poetry workshop or discover a creative medium that surprises you.
In her book Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives, British researcher Daisy Fancourt outlines how music in hospitals is more than entertainment. It influences patients’ emotions, helps them cope and supports their recovery. How might we invite artists to engage more deeply, meaningfully, and to become part of the “body” of health-care practitioners? Where artists are woven as part of health systems, not just patchwork.
Since 2002, the Arts for Healing Foundation has installed more than 14,500 artworks in hundreds of health-care institutions across Canada to inspire healing in spaces that need hope. RxART pairs leading contemporary artists with pediatric hospitals to humanize health-care environments and improve patient experiences. ArtWork for Cancer places donated art in cancer centres, contributing to a compassionate environment for individuals experiencing treatment. You can walk down corridors at University Health Network (UHN) Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and observe an array of visual arts or hear tunes from musicians in the atrium.
In Ontario, hospitals and community health centres are increasingly incorporating episodic and project-based art using short-term funding and externally driven collaborations. Some examples include OCAD University artist-designed units at Toronto Western Hospital, Mississauga Arts Council’s ArtsCare micro-grants for creative interventions and the health centres that offer art-based programming.
However, many initiatives position artists as adjacent to care teams rather than formally employed as part of the interprofessional team. For the most part, this collaboration is informal and sporadic. It’s program-based, time-limited and not standardized.
There are promising examples of how this can be improved.
The University of Alberta Hospital’s Artists on the Wards hire artists as staff, supporting skilled volunteers to offer one-on-one bedside support and group programs that provide therapeutic value through participation in literary, musical and visual arts. Patients have reported reduced pain, improved well-being, greater self-confidence and elevated mood, all of which contribute to healing and a deeper understanding of their health journey. Tania Bruguera, the head of media and performance at Harvard University, says that artists may be among the most valuable health workers of our time because they help us process trauma, imagine different realities and create spaces where people can reflect on their lives and society.
This impact becomes even more pronounced in newcomer-serving contexts, where health is shaped by displacement, trauma and barriers to care. Artists and art can be integral in meeting the mental health and health needs of some of the most vulnerable populations including newcomers, immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and non-status individuals and their families. Toronto’s Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Services created a framework in 2024 in which artmaking supports emotional expression, social connection, culturally tailored services and often serves as the first point of entry to health care.
Arts for Everybody describes artists as cultural bearers, trusted messengers, storytellers and healers who connect communities to history, purpose and well-being. Indigenous-grounded arts such as drum circles have been used for healing and community building to support mental, spiritual, emotional and physical-wellbeing since time immemorial.
Art practice is not a new concept. It reflects fundamental human behaviours that have sustained us and provided meaning throughout our lives, including during crisis and celebration. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) affirms in Article 27 that everyone has the right to participate in cultural life and benefit from the arts.
An even more daring statement might be that art engagement is health behaviour, as important as making choices about diets, better sleep and exercising. How might you heal differently if your health-care team included an artist?
