Power of art in healthcare

What you need to know:

Display of art, especially images of nature can have positive impact on people’s health. Here’s a story of a doctor who is boosting healthcare beyond the conventional boundaries.

It was a cool Friday morning at Morogoro Regional Hospital, last week. Dr Peter Bulugu, 32, sat quietly in the paediatric ward and watched, as nurses moved their trolleys from bed to bed—stopped at some points—as they drew out syringes to administer medicine to crying babies. Dr Bulugu had just painted pictures on the hospital’s walls . He is a doctor and a painter.

“Babies fear injections and adults, at times,’’ says Bulugu, a doctor who quit medical practice and ventured in artwork. Based in Zanzibar, Bulugu is now popular as Daktari mchoraji (a doctor who draws). Through his experience in drawings and paintings, he says he has learnt how to promote people’s health through artwork.

“Unfortunately, we grew up seeing pictures of nurses injecting crying babies. Such pictures were common on the hospital walls, doors and posters. This has had implications on how we perceive hospital settings and how we tend to seek for healthcare,’’ says Dr Bulugu.

But, last week at Morogoro Hospital ward, Bulugu says, a momentary sense of calm was palpable as some mothers whose children were crying for fear of being injected, took solace in the new artwork paintings that he was putting on the hospital walls. “The mothers used this to calm down their crying babies.”

“It was phenomenal,’’ says Dr Bulugu who, for the past few months, has been running a charity project to paint hospital walls with attractive images as a way of promoting positive behaviour among people seeking medical care.

“I had this idea of doing something for children in the hospitals. I shared it with colleagues-doctors, we agreed with each other, so I donated pictures in three hospitals; at Temeke in Dar es Salaam, Vijibweni in Kigamboni plus this project in Morogoro,” he says.

“At Morogoro Regional hospital, where I recently spent about two weeks, I saw how babies reacted inquisitively to painted walls. You see, there is a close connection between a state of mind and different colours, images or paintings,” he says.

He refers to a study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM) which concluded, “[…] visual art in hospitals can provide medical benefits to patients, but […] the quality of the evidence is not uniformly high.”

Titled: Visual art in hospitals: case studies and review of the evidence, the study however, further says, “[…] patients who are ill or stressed about their health may not always be comforted by abstract art, preferring the positive distraction and state of calm created by the blues and greens of landscape and nature scenes […].”

Artwork is increasingly becoming an important part of treatment in Tanzania due to the growing demand for friendly services for reproductive child and adolescent health, says a clinical psychologist based at Muhimbili National Hospital (MNH), Mr Isaac Lema.

“In mental health, we are also relying on artwork to diagnose certain patients,’’ he tells Your Health.

“For instance, patients who have experienced traumatic events, such as disasters, abuse or rape; at times may fail to communicate their inner feelings to psychologists. So, there is a way of making them express these feelings by asking them to draw a series of images on a paper,’’ says Mr Lema.

“This is called art therapy, and through the pictures that the patients draw, psychologists can go along to interpret or rather diagnose their problems and intervene accordingly,” says Lema.

For the case of hospital wall paintings, Lema insists that the demand for making a hospital appear friendly has been increasing due to the growing push for reproductive child and adolescent health.

“Through the use of this artwork, more and more children and adolescent can develop positive behaviour in seeking healthcare,’’ he explains during an interview with Your Health.

Dr Bulugu’s story. How he quit medicine

“I think I have real passion for painting. My mother was a nurse. Perhaps that’s why I ended up going to medical school to study to become a doctor. I loved being a medical doctor but in the long run, I realised that I had a great desire in something else,” he added.

But, he recalls, “I started painting when I was in primary school, I always painted pictures of students and teacher in class, I used to participate in different competitions in school too.”

Bulugu says he continued being engaged in drawings up to university at the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Science(Muhas) where he graduated in 2013 and later went to Zanzibar for internship at Mnazi Mmoja Hospital.

“When I was in Zanzibar I was exposed to art. There is a large number of tourists visiting the Isles. There are a lot of tourist shops where they sell paintings, so I decided to join in my extra hours and weekends,” he recalls.

Later, when he was finally registered as a medical officer, he started working at Ikondo hospital in Makete in Njombe Region in 2015 but in early 2016, he left the job to start up a drawings and paintings shop in Zanzibar.

“I found that friends I had been working with, had gotten their own shops and they were earning a living…I was inspired and I decided to join them. I started with a small shop in May 2016 and I had to work so hard,” he says, as he details his employment journey.

He now runs two shops; one in Nungwi and another one in Stone Town, in Zanzibar.

“So, in December 2018, I decided to give back to my society. That’s how I came up with this idea of promoting health in hospitals through paintings on walls.”

“I use a lot of green and blue colours. Psychologically […] blue and green colour calm down minds, so in my drawings I tend to use these colours,” says Dr Bulugu.

“These colours promote emotional recovery, that includes relieving anxiety and decreasing perception of pain. The art can reduce stress and loneliness and provides opportunity for self-expression.”

“This can help people reduce the use of painkiller medication and length of staying in the hospital. In return, this reduces treatment cost because they stay for short period in the hospital and reduce painkiller intake. It reduces error and increase effectiveness in providing healthcare.”

“This artwork is important for medical students. It enhances their skills, improves their observational, diagnostic and emphatic abilities, it helps them to understand patients in various ways, “