One minute to breathe. How images of nature can help save our A&E staff

About this episode

The episode discusses how nature-based art can alleviate stress for A&E staff in high-pressure environments.

Emergency departments are some of the most punishing workplaces in healthcare. Clinicians move in seconds from breaking catastrophic news to families, to resuscitating a dying patient, to reassuring a parent whose child has a simple fever. We rightly talk a lot about patient experience. We talk far less about what these relentless environments do to the people who work in them. A pilot study published in the Journal of Biophilic Design suggests that something as simple as one minute of looking at nature-based art can measurably ease that burden. The research was led by emergency physician and US Army major Dr Anant Shukla at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, with Dr Harman Gill , an emergency and critical care physician, as senior researcher. Their lived experience in A&E (ED) is the backdrop to the work. Gill recounts a single shift that started with the emergency delivery of a baby girl in the middle of a chaotic winter flu season. Within 40 minutes, the new mother was in catastrophic postpartum haemorrhage. The same team that had just celebrated a new life found themselves fighting to save another. Then, as he points out, they must walk into the next cubicle…

People in this episode

Host: Vanessa Champion

Guests: Dr Anant Shukla, Dr Harman Gill

Topics covered

• healthcare
• emergency medicine
• mental health
• nature therapy
• workplace wellbeing

Keywords

• emergency department
• nature-based art
• clinician wellbeing
• healthcare stress
• patient care

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Journal of Biophilic Design

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