Artist Open Call - Exploring Patient Data and Surgical Healthcare

Medical interventions and decisions are driven by data from an increasingly intricate array of measurements and tests, which creates a vivid representation of each patient. This data representation is often complex and obscure to the patient, yet has a profound impact on the trajectory of care.

We are looking for two artists, one focussing on prostate and the other on pancreatic cancer, to develop online based projects that bring together engineers, clinicians and patients to share their experiences of clinical decisions and explore what is needed for patients to feel informed in the face of complex data.

Using arts practice, we seek to facilitate conversations between these stakeholders and develop a final output building on workshop findings. The output is open but should communicate workshop discussions and findings, provoke further engagement with the topics and/or have potential as a communication aid between patients and doctors.

Collaborator Role

Through this artistic collaboration we are interested in exploring emerging themes in clinical practice, such as:

• the relationship between patients, their data and clinical practice
• the role of uncertainty and managing risk in clinical interventions
• the challenge of keeping patients engaged and informed when clinical procedures are becoming increasingly sophisticated

The collaborators will work with a project team from the Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences, which brings engineers and clinicians together to develop technologies for planning, conducting and rehabilitation from surgery, with chances to also share and learn from each other.

Budget and Timescale

Each of the two projects will offer a maximum of £3,000 in total for artist time and expenses, workshop materials and final outputs. 

There is no current timeline, but we hope to begin the project in March and expect it will take 2 – 4 months to complete.

How to Apply

Please contact Alexander Grimwood (alexander.grimwood@ucl.ac.uk) by Wednesday 3rd March 2021 (10:00am) explaining your experience, interest in the topic and what approaches you might bring in no more than one A4 page.

Please try to respond to all or some of the themes below in your response:

• an interest in the effect of data in health / surgical treatment and relationships
• experience of working with publics, patients and/or communities
• experience of using arts practice to facilitate conversations and explore complex topics
• experience using exploratory practice to inform design-based tools and outputs