About this episode
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 – whether it’s a heart attack or “just the sniffles”, and deliver the same standard of calm, competent care. What happened 20 minutes earlier is invisible to the next patient, but not to the clinician’s nervous system.Shukla describes the ED as “controlled chaos”, windowless, noisy, metal and plastic surfaces, a “cave” in the hospital basement. During Covid, he noticed something striking, upstairs, patients on certain wards with views of nature or biophilic art were using less narcotic pain medication. Staff downstairs had nothing similar. “We do so much for patients and visitors,” he says. “Why not for clinicians?”From that question came a this experiment: could just one minute of viewing biophilic art shift clinicians’ emotional state in a meaningful way?
