Photographic Wall Mural Project at VCH

The goal of health care is to provide the care, services, and environment needed to produce the best possible patient outcome. To ensure the maximum level of care is provided, we must ensure that all of the variables we control that make up the patient experience are positive.

When a person requires treatment they have experienced some form of trauma. Stress, despair, and pain are all factors that lead to negative experiences and impair the healing process. While health care spaces are meant to help people, the unfamiliarity and isolation can make people feel uneasy.

Artwork has long been used in therapy because it promotes calm, hopefulness, and an opportunity to help the mind focus on something other than trauma and treatment.

By creating a health care environment in which professional expertise, medical technology, and artwork are working to have a positive effect on the patient, we are making certain we are controlling all of the variables that will put a patient in a state that is receptive to healing. This approach maximizes the odds of a positive treatment outcome overall.

Pictured throughout is a project Lifelightlens Photography did in partnership with Heritage Office Furnishings at a sensitive medical site in Vancouver Canada. The client is a health authority and the site is dedicated to dealing with very sensitive medical procedures. The space planners came to us for a solution that would help provide a calming atmosphere for patients, while being applicable to the furniture systems Heritage was installing.

We selected an image in consultation with the planners and staff, and then printed it as a vinyl photographic wall mural up to health code, and cut specifically to fit the tiles of the office furniture space divider. While the spaces need to be medically sterile, they need not, and should not be visually sterile. People are affected by their surroundings, so we need to make sure the effect is a positive one.

When people are dealing with health issues, they are trying to overcome a stressful and unpleasant period in their life. The vast majority do not want to be in a health care facility. They are human beings who would much rather be healthy and living their lives surrounded by the environments they feel comfortable in. While we cannot instantly cure ailments, we can do our best to make sure the environment we provide them with while we assist them in healing, is as calming and pleasant as possible.

We can make art work for patients in health care spaces. By creating an inspired environment that helps the people we care for be receptive to healing, we check as many boxes as possible towards a positive patient experience.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Damon Fraietta, Lifelightlens