Visual arts, performing arts and creative writing in health professional education: A Scoping Review

AbstractAIM: Public health professionals need evidence-based education to equip them with sufficient knowledge to recommend creative community programmes and arts therapies. The current review asks ‘What is known about how visual arts, performing arts, and creative writing are embedded in health and medical education?’.METHOD: A search across six different databases [CINAHL, ERIC, Medline, AMED, Proquest Dissertations, and Web of Science] identified 6090 papers, and 284 were included. The core search terms were 1. Visual arts; performance arts and creative writing 2. Tertiary education and 3.Health Professionals. Descriptive statistics were used to quantify the characteristics learning activities. Thematic analysis was used to identify the intended learning outcomes.RESULTS: Nursing was the most represented profession, followed closely by medicine. An extremely wide range of art practices were identified including graffiti, sculpture, clowning, cinematic arts, music, creative writing, poetry, dance, photo, and art viewing. The review characterises how visual arts, performing arts, and creative writing are currently being used, including the group size, setting, engagement style, and collaboration with creative practitioners. Surprisingly, only 10% of studies identified educated professionals on the evidence base underpinning creative interventions and therapies, and no mention of social prescribing was identified. Instead the main learning outcomes that were targeted were professional development (promoting empathy, communication, preparedness for practice, negative attitudes), clinical practice (critical thinking, specialist knowledge, clinical skills), and personal development (self-awareness, wellbeing).CONCLUSION: This review highlights the need for more educational provision in relation to patient-focussed outcomes, in community arts, creative arts therapies, and social prescribing. Future curricula could engage arts practitioners and cultural spaces more directly to support experiential learning approaches and evaluate creative techniques to identify if they can enhance student learning.