Projects
Rehumanising the Waiting Room
Welcome to the project page for Rehumanising the Waiting Room.
We invite you to take a moment to listen....
https://on.soundcloud.com/EFnhxoFEsCkSVAKdph
How does this music make you feel? What did you think of the birds? The trees? And then there’s the buzz saws, perhaps they got your attention. Did you get distracted? Did you lose your train of thought and was it easy to let go? What did you feel next?
This is what we want to know.
Rehumanising the Waiting Room focuses on pregnancy complications and pregnancy loss.
This project is led by Hester Crombie and Vanessa Moore.
In Rehumanising the Waiting Room we want to work with women experiencing pregnancy complications or pregnancy loss to explore how sound can be used to improve their experience in hospital waiting rooms.
We know that in this context the experience of waiting can be particularly distressing. In these situations there can be many different types of waiting – for assessments, for confirmations, for test results, as well as waiting before and in between consultations and procedures – and, due to the stigma and climate of secrecy attached to pregnancy loss, patients often face these periods alone, without the support of wider family and friends that would be found in the case of other medical issues.
We understand this experience as we have been through it ourselves. We work as Patient Tutors at the Nuffield Department for Women’s and Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford speaking to students about our experiences of complex recurrent miscarriage. We help the students to better understand the patient experience and discuss ways in which practitioners can help to reduce the level of distress, this is undoubtedly the most significant part of the experience but we believe that the environment itself can also have an important role to play. We want to explore how sound and music can be used to transform the experience of waiting into time that is helpful and that prepares patients for more positive healthcare interactions.
We are in the process of seeking funding to support this project.
Our proposed activities will include:
drawing on existing and new patient and public feedback to better understand experiences of waiting.
experimenting with different types of sounds and methods of producing music.
working with former and current patients through musical workshops to explore the types of sounds they feel would be helpful in a clinic or hospital waiting room setting.
developing creative outputs and activities that can be delivered in the waiting rooms at the Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit in Oxford.
evaluating our activities and developing guidelines for wider implementation.
If you would like to find out more about the project or be added to our mailing list to potentially contribute to our surveys or musical workshops for former and current patients, please get in touch by emailing Vanessa through the contact form.
We are open to hearing from anyone with experience of pregnancy complications or pregnancy loss.
We look forward to working with you.