Observing Art While Building Skills

Did the first workshop meet or exceed your expectations?

The workshop exceeded my expectations. At first, I wasn’t too sure what to expect as it was a completely new experience for me overall. Also, I wasn’t sure as to how it would directly correlate with the healthcare field. After the workshop, I was able to see exactly how it will be applicable to my career as a provider.  

What did you like best about it?

Besides the useful information I learned by participating in this workshop, the thing I liked best was the environment. I really liked that we were able to go to the Philadelphia Art Museum and gain knowledge that will help us become better providers. For the most part, it is assumed, to be a better provider, a student should be at a healthcare related clinic or reading textbooks, but I really enjoyed being able to go to an environment that is not healthcare related and still be able to learn and gain useful knowledge to help us be better providers. 

Do you look forward to the additional workshops?

I do look forward to the additional workshops. I look forward to them because after the first workshop, I am eager to learn and see what other activities we will do  that will help us become a better provider. 

What did you learn?

From the workshop, I learned the importance to be observational when you encounter a patient coming in for care. I think most healthcare providers, or society as a whole, unconsciously make reflexive assumptions about a situation or individual. As we learned at the workshop, it is important to first observe what you see, and not to interpret or make assumptions until you are able to get more information from the patient or the situation. Also, I learned the importance of communicating effectively with members of the healthcare team.  It is also important to communicate every detail (minor or major) to ensure that each provider who comes in contact with the patient is able to provide quality care.

Have you been able to put into action what you learned during the first workshop?

I was able to use the knowledge learned for the Philadelphia Art Museum right away. The information I learned from the workshop was put into action at my first hospital experience. I was able to take the information learned from the museum and directly apply it to my patient encounters at the hospital, which made my overall experience that much better.  I felt the workshop gave me a different perspective that most PA students do not have because they did not have the same opportunity as we did at Salus. 

Would you recommend it to other students?

Yes, I would recommend it to other students in the medical field. I do not think it should be limited to just PA or medical students though. I think any student that interacts with a patient in their field would benefit from this workshop at the Philadelphia Art Museum.  

I just wanted to say I loved this experience. It was a like a vacation from the classroom. I truly didn’t know what to expect so I didn’t have any underlying expectations. My favorite part was when we partnered up and had to draw and convey the image we were seeing. I definitely look forward to the next experience!

This was the first time I did something like this; as students, you are usually always doing classwork and reading locked away in a library somewhere. The fact that we were able to strengthen our observational skills and interpret an image was mind-blowing. I learned so much from just this exposure. I learned that communication is crucial and there are some things that aren’t obvious to the naked eye. I would highly recommend this to other PAs and people in general. I truly feel this is something that the average person should be exposed to and learn to appreciate art from a different perspective. In addition, these skills will definitely help in everyday life experiences. After this workshop, I have tried to implement more observational and interpretation skills whenever possible. Lastly, I wanted to say that I have a newfound appreciation for modern art. We ended with a room full of images that initially I was judgmental on the quality of the art. It was after dissection and discussion that I understood the underlying message the artist was trying to express. Although I prefer traditional art, I was still able to put aside my biases and look deeper into the meaning behind this artwork. If I had to be specific as to what part of the art museum was the most influential, it would have been the ending. This portion of the workshop is what will make me a better clinician. To me, it represented a future patient that may be completely different from me and I have to put aside any assumptions and see this patient for who they are and look at the bigger picture to understand how I can provide the best care. Thank you again for this wonderful experience!

Did the first workshop meet or exceed your expectations?

The workshop really exceeded my expectations; it was really interesting to learn to strip away that natural inclination to automatically make an interpretation about what we are looking at, sort of bypassing the actual looking itself, and it’s much more difficult to do that than I thought.

What did you like best about it?

The descriptive and communicative activities we did with classmates at the museum, like describing the works of art to them as they tried to replicate them from our descriptions, really brought into focus a lot of the intricacies as well as the problematic parts of communication that felt really clinically relevant and immediate. I noticed that feeling pressured for time was really detrimental to my ability to communicate effectively and that my own assumptions – that someone would sort of innately understand what I meant when I spoke without really following up with them – was a valuable lesson. Also, when I looked at something without having any context to view it with versus when I was given some background on what I was looking at made a dramatic difference in how I perceived something.

Do you look forward to the additional workshops?

Definitely.

Have you been able to put into action what you learned during the first workshop?

I had my first clinical experience after attending the workshop and though I’m still very new to this I think I took with me from the workshop the idea that my words have more weight than I’m always aware of and just because someone may have nodded their head or verbalized understanding doesn’t mean that I was necessarily effective in communicating. What I hope to get out of future workshops at the museum in correlation with my clinical experiences is continuing to be aware of the fact that there is a lot of depth and nuance to communicating with others – both patients and with other students or faculty - and that I need to be cognizant of my own biases and aware of ones that others may have, and remember that others may perceive things differently than I do or communicate differently than I do. I hope as I develop my descriptive vocabulary as it pertains to medicine during my didactic education I can, with these workshops, learn to be creative and flexible with how I employ it.

Would you recommend it to other students?

Definitely.