The Use of Visual Arts in Health Care

Following the numerous scientific activities, there is a specific stigma related to science careers due to considerable focus on narrowed specializations, which are not accessible to the general grasp. However, enhancing scientific learning is intricate especially in learning institutions. Although explanations are widely used as effective strategy to advance knowledge acquisition, it is recognized that detailed understanding of concepts is suitable when placed in wider perspective of importance to daily life issues and goals that led to the development of the wider society (Tyler & Likova, 2012). The very goals trigger the importance of investigating the association between learning and knowledge in the arts. Again, the need is required urgently since in United States the literacy level for arts and science is rather low while education initiatives are exclusively scarce. To some degree science is related to useful sections of artistic venture, making not only available but also an ideal issue of study. Furthermore, there is a growing level of neuroscience research, which fosters increasing the transfer of learning from arts to other disciplines (Rieger & Chernomas, 2013).

According to Tyler & Likova (2012) inspiration is a vital concept in artistic experiences both for the artist and the viewer alike. Fascinatingly, artistic triggered inspiration comprises of elevated cortical circuitry that integrates brain parts like the limbic and medial frontal systems that are responsible for mediating emotions, motivational rewards and recognition of esthetic principles of the invading. Therefore, inspiration has the ability to convert any given career into a pursuit, the basic of fulfillment in attaining objectives in life. On the contrary, without inspiration, the motivation to adjust, discover and thrive in life is hindered. However, the ability to integrate art and science can help to trigger the underlying motivation. In the end, the use of visual arts presents an array of prospects that enhance the mastery of the most complex subjects.

Relevance to the Course

The role of visual arts is relevant to health especially, in terms of training practitioners because of the innumerable benefits it presents (Tyler & Likova, 2012). For instance, visual arts enhance the mental performance of medical students. When Video clips are used in operations rooms, they tend to eliminate a nerve-racking atmosphere. As such, the medical teams are able to concentrate on their assignments. The outcome has been exemplary performance that improves the quality of care. Moreover, the visual arts play a critical role when it comes to cultivating observational skills that are much needed for medical practitioners. Through proximal observation, the medical students can enhance drawing capability and augment their stereo vision (Jasani & Saks, 2013). On the other hand, neurosurgeons are more likely to enhance not just a critical but also a 3-dimensional mind processing capability.

The integration of visual arts in the learning process of nursing students enhances their consciousness in handling sicknesses and grief (Rieger & Chernomas, 2013). Nonetheless, visual arts will help bolster the confidence of students in their practice. The use of visual arts teaching nursing and medical student enhance the analytical approach towards life and everyday occurrence (Miller et al. 2013). As a result of this critical outlook, students get a better comprehension of illness and suffering, an aspect that prompts practitioners to respond not just in a reflective way but also compassionately in meeting patient needs.

Apart from stimulating creativity, new levels of expression and self-esteem, visual arts present immense benefits in mental healthcare by enhancing communication capabilities among patients, family and practitioners. Moreover, visual arts are important aspects of the learning process in healthcare because of the behavioral benefits in mental care associated with the patient’s tranquility, attentiveness and collaboration (Rieger & Chernomas, 2013). These variations are instrumental in the management of mental health services; lessen the need for drugs as well as physical restriction.

The use of literature and poetry for instance has the ability to help nursing and medical students to comprehend the cultural, social, ethnic and economic variables that have a huge bearing on the patient’s healing process. Conversely, visual arts and drama can help patients not just to express themselves but also comprehend their environment better, take control of their inner being and advance their mental wellness. Ultimately, it enhances compassion between practitioners and patients.

Significance to the Future of Informatics

The role of the visual arts in enhancing the learning process relates to health information system on many fronts (Rieger & Chernomas, 2013). Just as healthcare informatics is necessary to advance the quality of care, information visualization is an important element that would make it easier to grasp volumes of medical information towards realizing the same objective. Medical technologies such as x-rays, CT scans and MRIs have altered the medical field simply because they present accurate 3D visualization. This helps medical practitioners to highlight not just areas with problems but also to make informed decisions about the best treatment. The outcome has been improved quality of care. Moreover, visualization in surgical procedures, drug discovery and genomic expression appraisals has been a huge success in the medical world.

In addition, data visualization is critical when it comes to enhancing the benefits of health informatics repositories and structures by vividly broadening the capability of patients and medical practitioners (Shneiderman, Plaisant & Hesse, 2013). Nonetheless, it is on this backdrop that public health law makers are able to make informed decisions.

Again, visual art is useful in the future health informatics, especially based on the fact it helps in accessing online information while personal sensors will be used to enhance patient understanding of their wellbeing. This will be a significant transition from paternalistic standpoint of health care where patients leave the responsibility to practitioners and only go for checkup when sick. Patient-based initiatives include lifestyle changes, nutritional supplements, exercises and so forth. With health informatics, patients will be empowered to monitor their health, treatment programs or understand their health problems and comply with exercise programs.

As devices will be enhanced and artists recognize motivational systems, patients will be in a position to effectively monitor their health. According to Tyler & Likova, (2012) visual art will also act as the communicative structure for future health informatics to disseminate ideas while explaining the basis as to why brain systems support cognitive roles including human language in arts-music and drawings. Being a multidisciplinary communication channel, art will present an effective platform for understanding different health conditions while offering motivational inspiration to investigate further, ask questions, and engage in divergent and convergent thinking (Tyler & Likova, 2012). However, there will be the need to identify suitable motivational approaches s and the scope motivational inspiration to enhance the future repertoire of health informatics.

Because of visual arts, the future of health informatics will see many changes in quality clinical outcomes. In the care of cancer, visual arts will be useful in dealing with depression and fretfulness during chemotherapy (Miller et al., 2013). Visual arts and music will be suitable measures for minimizing depression and unease and in turn avert the negative effects of chemotherapy.

Visual arts will also be important in cardiovascular units. In this case, music and video-music will be used to considerably reduce uneasiness in the level of blood pressure and heart rate. In the intensive care units (ICU) music will be used to increase behavioral and clinical conditions, which will greatly reduce hospitalization rates. Medical processes especially diagnosis and screening, contribute to high stress level. Therefore, visual arts will be used to enhance the perception of comfort, decrease cortisol levels and drastically control blood pressure.

Visual arts will also be relevant in the future informatics, such that music will be used to greatly reduce psychological as well as physiological variables associated with indicators of pain. Specially, music will help in reduce pain following a surgical procedure. Again, in surgical procedures, visual arts will minimize anxiety and stress whereas controlling vital signs (Miller et al. 2013). Music will be an important strategy for helping patients recover from post-operation and decrease the need for sedatives.

While there is insufficient research on the impacts of visual arts on healthcare, the future of informatics will greatly benefit. For example, positive clinical outcomes will be induced through the use mediation and classical music to minimize anxiety and stress. But live music is more beneficial compared to recorded music tapes. Common music tunes pre-chosen by patients will be appropriate in mental health when it comes to activating familiar experiences and satisfaction. Furthermore, integration of visual arts in informatics will be helpful in enhancing observation skills among practitioners and improving the well-being of patients (Jasani & Saks, 2013).

Science and technological developments will demonstrate the mechanisms involved in processing emotional reactions triggered by visual arts. Most importantly, the developments will show various parts of the brain and neural systems involved. Such explorations will help scientists to comprehend the causes of various illnesses and look for effective preventive measures. This will be realized by way of visual arts, their functioning and how shapes, colors or forms can be connected with certain process in the brain (Miller et al. 2013). This awareness will help practitioners to understand the trends of emotional reactions triggered by various visual arts hence, develop an effective healing environment.

In future, nursing and medical students will be introduced to visual arts in galleries so as to present health evaluation of mental, physical and environmental aspects of the artworks (Miller et al. 2013). According to Tyler & Likova, (2012) this practice will help students enhance their observation skills, enhance understanding of addressing health problems across diverse cultures and strengthen confidence in their practice. Jasani & Saks, (2013) asserts that observational skills in nursing and medical practice are useful when it comes to increasing neurosurgery and other surgical procedures. Moreover, they contend that observation skills in medical and nursing practice are partially a gift and training. In this perspective, visual arts will be crucial in the development of neurosurgeon. Again, visual forms will also be essential in increasing counseling skills among health providers when counseling the bereaved.

Recommendations Based on the Significance to the Future of Informatics

Based on the significance of visual arts in future informatics, nursing and medical students should be introduced to visual artworks. This will help them in developing observation skills, which is important in surgical procedures. In addition, medical schools should also integrate visual arts both contemporary and classical to enhance their understanding of the complex nature of people and their health problems. To realize these goals medical schools should form alliance with artists and art galleries.

Another proposition is that art is primarily a communicative platform, therefore to ensure that it effective useful in informatics, policy makers should focus on artists and consumers-patients and health practitioners, concentrating on one party would be insufficient. This dual emphasis is important in recognizing and developing concepts of how to appreciate visual arts in informatics. An effective theory should take into consideration componential as well as holistic aspects that lead to artistic activities.

Learning art entails a multifaceted interplay of several sensory and cognitive abilities, thus to realize adequate appreciation in managing pain, stress and anxiety, the focus should take into account the complexity of interactions such as learning and appreciating visual art (Tyler & Likova, 2012). Casual systems for diffusing information in the cortical areas must be used to present new knowledge regarding the neutral mechanisms of the plasticity of the brain that are essential for developing cognitive training programs.

Moreover, advanced techniques should be incorporated and used in assessing psychophysiological responses to art learning. This is crucial when it comes to appreciating physiological reactions and presenting opportunities for converging strategies. Scholars should take into consideration art as a dynamic cognitive procedure where the description of art is changing remarkably. As such, they should come up with learning functions to establish the naturally disorganized modality.

Information systems in health care should be made simple and sustainable rather than overburdening health providers or expensive to manage. Providers are interested in the feedback and how gathered data may be used on a regular basis and recognize the significance of quality of information to improve service delivery. In addition, capacity building is needed to make sure that policy makers have the capacity to not only use but also interpret health data. Also, it is of great importance for health providers to comprehend the relevance of data in reinforcing capacity for fulfilling healthcare statistical assessment. Cumulative patients’ details gathered at different service provision points and regular HIS enhances the use and quality of health data.

Conclusion
While previous healthcare information systems were created to compute transactions from a medical or management context, modern focus is centered on the aspect of performance and improved quality of care. At the heart of this paradigm shift has been the need visual analytics that has the capability to integrate different applications. As such, the enormous expansion of data visualization, analytics and health information indicate promising health outcomes such as improved monitoring, health policy, clinical treatment and the quality of care (Shneiderman, Plaisant & Hesse, 2013).

With the help of visual art, medical practitioners can be able to map patient injuries in different locations and administer appropriate remedial services. From the study, it is also important to note that collaborative visualization can aid medics and those in charge of the safety of patients probe EHR repositories to have a grasp of applicable trends (Shneiderman, Plaisant & Hesse, 2013). Again, visualization will help divulge data anomalies that are evident when using medical data for qualitative review (Shneiderman, Plaisant & Hesse, 2013).

Furthermore, contemporary visual art it presents remarkable outcome summaries as well as other fluid connections to determine trends that are relevant in addressing patient conditions. Through visual analytics, healthcare facilities in different countries are able to make prompt decisions and respond by scaling back viral outbreaks or biological attacks. In the end, cloud computing data has become an increasingly vital element of health informatics in comprehending not just lethal outbreaks but also in embracing healthy trends.

From the article, it becomes paramount how visual arts play an imperative aspect in the cultivation of observational skills and when it comes to honing a three-dimensional mind processing ability (Jasani & Saks, 2013). This leads to increased confidence among nursing and medical students. In cardiovascular units for instance, visualization is integral in reducing nervousness, blood pressure and heart rate. In the ICU, virtualization has proved the likelihood to enhance behavioral and clinical conditions that lessen hospitalization rates. In the end, visual arts remain an important facet of healthcare learning because it helps nursing and medical students to understand cultural, social, ethnic as well as economic factors that have a huge impact on the patient’s healing process (Tyler & Likova, 2012).

Reference

Jasani, S. K., & Saks, N. S. (2013). Utilizing visual art to enhance the clinical observation skills of medical students. Medical teacher, 35(7), e1327-e1331.

Miller, A., Grohe, M., Khoshbin, S., & Katz, J. T. (2013). From the galleries to the clinic: Applying art museum lessons to patient care. Journal of Medical Humanities, 34(4), 433-438.

Rieger, K. L., & Chernomas, W. M. (2013). Arts-based learning: Analysis of the concept for nursing education. International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship, 10(1), 1-10.

Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C., & Hesse, B. W. (2013). Improving healthcare with interactive visualization. Computer, 46(5), 58-66.

Tyler, C,W., & Likova, L, T,. (2012). The role of the visual arts in enhancing the learning Process. Frontier in Human Neuroscience. 6(8)1-6.