33: Why Artist and Cultural Organizers in Hospitals Are Changing How We Heal

Jill Sonke is a creative healer in service to a community of doctors, nurses, artists, educators, and most of all, patients on a journey that reunites the arts and medicine in their age-old roles as healing partners. BIOJill is director of the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida (UF), and is currently serving as Senior Advisor to the CDC Vaccine Confidence and Demand Team on the COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence Task Force. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the UF School of Theatre & Dance, Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases, the Center for African Studies, the STEM Translational Communication Center, and the One Health Center. Jill serves on the editorial board for Arts & Health journal and as a consulting editor for Health Promotion Practice journal. She is also director of the EpiArts Lab, a National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab at UF, and the national initiative, Creating Health Communities: Arts + Public Health in America. Dr. Sonke studied dance at Interlochen Arts Academy, the Florida State University, in London, Paris, and Athens with teachers of the Horton and Duncan techniques including Bella Lewitsky, Lynda Davis, Milton Meyers, Joy Kellman, Lori Belilove, Julia Levine, and Hortense Koluris. She has been a principle dancer and soloist with Lori Belilove & the Isadora Duncan Dance Company in New York and a guest performer and choreographer with Dance Alive! and Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theatre.With 27+ years of experience and leadership in arts in health, Dr. Sonke is active in research, teaching, and international cultural exchange. Her current research focuses on the arts and health communication, the arts in public health, and the effects of music on cost and quality of care in emergency medicine. She is the recipient of a New Forms Florida Fellowship Award, a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Award, an Excellence in Teaching Award from the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, a UF Internationalizing the Curriculum Award, a UF Most Outstanding Service Learning Faculty Award, a UF Public Health Champions award, a UF Cross-Campus Faculty Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and over 300 grants for her programs and research at the University of Florida.Delicious QuotesWe were very fortunate to be in an institution with leaders who understood that the arts fit and we're important in a healthcare setting. That people should have the ability to engage creatively to make that experience of healthcare better, not just patients, but staff, and visitors and others.I remember going into rooms and introducing myself, you know, " dancer in residence," and people would furrow their brow and say, “I'm in the hospital, that doesn't belong here.” … Then the view of our program kind of evolved into “It's really nice. … it's really lovely.” And then after a bit more time, the overarching recognition was that this is really important …because our, our care providers we're recognizing that artists are really crucial members of the interprofessional care team.We interviewed all 31 members of the nursing staff on a medical surgical unit over a period of about 18 months to learn about how they perceived the effects of the work of artists in residence on their unit. …So, we learned that nurses recognized the benefits of engagement in the arts for their patients. They were asking the artists to come in when their patients needed distraction and relaxation, those sorts of things. … from a clinical perspective, they noticed that blood oxygen saturation. It would go up. That wasn't the focus of our study. I want to be clear, but observationally, they were noting the clinical things like...

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