The human side of health care
Featured on bostonglobe.com
A man whose elderly father fell and was wrongly diagnosed with an ear infection. Parents of an infant with acid reflux. A nurse who takes the time to listen to the dying sort through their relationships.
These are some of the stories featured in Patient Translations, an ongoing project created by Boston-area artists Kelly Sherman and Halsey Burgund that collects tales of the health care system and blends them into audio collage and telling snippets of text, empowering patients and their loved ones to share experiences of waiting rooms, diagnoses, and insurance companies.
The project is being publicly displayed as an installation at health care conferences but is available online for anyone to listen to or contribute a story; there are about 300 clips in the collage thus far.
Kate Desjardins’s brother was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphona 2½ years ago when he was 24. Since then, he has had two stem cell transplants.
“It’s grueling for everybody,” says Desjardins, a middle school teacher from Bedford. “We trust the doctors, but we have to negotiate the medical system, which is not always the kindest thing.”
Burgund interviewed her for Patient Translations, and her voice is woven into the audio collage.
“There’s no other outlet anywhere for such a thing,” Desjardins says of sharing her story. “Especially for someone like me, who is just the sister.”
Often, the patient’s loved ones are the people navigating the system.
“I witness the inhumanity. They send him upstairs; they send him downstairs. He’s waiting an hour for one thing, and the next appointment has come up,” Desjardins says. “It feels sometimes like you’re screaming into a void.”
Sherman was commissioned by Amy Cueva, founder and chief experience officer of Mad*Pow, a New Hampshire-based design agency that stages an annual conference on the health care experience — from the ways insurers can better serve patients to creative ways doctors can collaborate with one another.
Click here to read the full article.