Doctor - Patient - Creative

There have been times my fierce commitment to roaming far and wide to inform my understanding of creativity has wavered.

It felt risky to write books, interview, and run music companies when my job title said 'illustrator'. As soon as people tried to bracket my podcast as 'an illustration podcast,' (after the first episode with Danny Allison), I piled it full of guests from far beyond one form of visual communication.

Episode 2 was a conversation from a chance encounter with then New York University's professor of theatre Rebecca Johannsen. And not out of any petty rebellion. I've simply always followed my curiosity, even when logic screamed otherwise. From the outset, I was in the service of creativity.

If you want to be truly creative, drawing only from the reservoir of existing industry material is counter-productive. Any narrowing of this kind has, in part, made things easier for AI. So the need for different thinking today is an emergency.

That's what I'm helping individuals and agencies with through The Creative Condition and my coaching work.

Before my conversation with HIV and sexual health consultant,Rageshri Dhairyawan about deep listening on episode 259 of the podcast, I read both her book, Unheard: The Medical Practice of Silencing and A Fortunate Woman, as referenced in Rageshri's work.

Rageshri's experiences of being unheard in healthcare, despite her work within it, taught me so much about the need to truly listen to people, to respect them and rise above our conscious and unconscious biases.

And very quickly, I joined the dots between the issues in healthcare detailed by Rageshri and the creative industry.

I'd like to share with you an excerpt from A Fortunate Woman, a stunning piece of work by Penny Mordant. Consider this in terms of the asphyxiating effect of data, protocol, liability, and risk aversion on creativity, storytelling, play, and joy.

You all know what I mean.

The rise of evidence-based medicine over her time in the practice has seen remarkable strides in the treatment of disease and improved medical outcomes beyond recognition. It was certainly transformative in the early days for the young doctor to anchor her clinical decisions within an established framework of best practice informed by the latest science. But what has proved more difficult to measure in terms of its efficacy is the value of the doctor-patient relationship within it. Because this is so hard to quantify and cold, hard figures, performance metrics inevitably skew towards incentivising outcomes that are easier to define in statistical terms and a population rather than a personal level. While not a bad thing in and of itself, this culture shift towards standardized interventions for common medical conditions has created a cascade of unintended consequences within primary care, many of which of eroded that doctor/patient relationship upon which it was once built. Workloads have increased, practices and their teams have gotten larger. The role of technology has expanded. Part-time working has become the norm. A portion of the press routinely use the issue of part-time working as a stick with which to beat the rising number of female GPs, but in reality, if the doctors of either gender, part-time working is the only way to endure the pressures of the job. All the while, the wholesale management of risk according to standardized guidelines trumps the judgment of individual doctors. Thus, by increments, the axis has tilted from an emphasis on the patient to an emphasis on disease, from interaction to transaction. Moreover, as patient numbers have risen, access to a doctor; any doctor has become the overriding priority and individual relationships find themselves push to the margins continuity of care remains much talked of but it's far less often achieved and because it's so tricky to measure it doesn't feature in the framework of payment incentives for general practitioners.

Let's welcome the massive potential that technology continues to offer creativity, but more caution about how much humanity we surrender to it is sorely needed. Those who thrive in the era of automation will be the ones who lead with authenticity, personality, and the lived experience, not those who demand cheap silver bullets.