[1] Keynote Address

[1-02] Keynote Address

Paul Crawford (Professor of Health Humanities, School of Health Sciences, University of Nottingham)

Creative Nursing and Health Humanities
Professor Crawford introduces the important role of health humanities through the lens of some of his highly funded research projects. He gives particular emphasis to the notions of ‘creative public health’ and ‘creative nursing’ against the backdrop of the Coronavirus pandemic. In this bicentenary year of the birth of Florence Nightingale, he fleshes out her astonishing creativity, not least in relation to the timely themes of health and contagion at home. This short overview is followed by discussion of the place of creative practice in advancing what Crawford has coined ‘mutual recovery’ among patients, healthcare staff and family carers and exciting new work to foreground social and cultural assets as a key contribution to public health. This is underlined by illustrating how ‘mutual recovery’ and social and cultural assets can align in providing novel, egalitarian approaches, for example, in dementia care. Finally, he outlines his latest project working with the Academy-award winning film company Aardman (Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep) to advance mental health literacy among young people as part of his innovative mission in creative public health—a much more generous vision of health provision, in which the concept of creative nursing could find a happy space.