In Conversation with Marion Lynch

Marion, you are a nurse and trustee of Paintings in Hospitals. Can you tell us a little more about your professional background?

I have been a nurse, clinical teacher, manager, and senior leader in the NHS for 38 years and in that time worked in hospitals, the community, mental health, and public health. This means that I have pretty much worked all over the NHS. I have also worked across the world in low resource countries and have seen first-hand the impact that the arts can have on health and wellbeing particularly when there are few clinical resources to be had. 

My Doctorate explored how the arts can be used to teach medicine and my ongoing role as a Visiting Professor allows me to focus on how the arts can help improve care for those living with dementia.

You found yourself briefly stranded in New Zealand when news of the COVID-19 pandemic broke. What role did you take on during the COVID-19 response in the UK?

New Zealand acted swiftly to shut down transport and services and I was suddenly stranded alone with nothing useful to do. Fortunately, I was asked to contribute to some e-modules on managing COVID-19. These e-modules would be available free of charge in low resource countries and my focus was on the mental health of the workforce. This work was for Primary Care International, a charity based in England. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed our daily lives. What have been the most challenging parts of that for you, professionally and personally?

On return to England, I worked at the Nightingale Hospital London as part of the education faculty. A new team of approximately 100 eager clinicians came together to train more than 2000 people in the space of four weeks. I lived in a hotel room without hotel facilities and I never wish to see a sandwich in a brown paper bag ever again. We were lucky to be provided with accommodation and food and I am grateful for the organisations that enabled us as clinicians to do our job. The training happened in the O2. It was cold, and it was huge. 

At the end of each day, I had little voice left and even less energy. I am perhaps not built for 8-hours-a-day, 6-days-a-week performances in the Arena. I was in awe of the staff coming forward and volunteering to be trained to work in what was an unknown and potentially unsafe situation. Our role was to make it safe for them. When the Nightingale closed, we were relieved to be returning home but I did feel a sense of loss and so I joined the NHS track and trace team to ensure that I stayed connected and useful. 

What have been the most rewarding elements of your recent healthcare work?

The most rewarding elements of my recent work have been teaching volunteers how to provide basic nursing care, supporting people recovering from COVID-19 to have access to information about their health and wellbeing, and collating the nursing staff experiences of COVID-19 from across Europe. The volunteers I trained were at the Nightingale and were people who were furloughed and just wishing to help somehow. People from the airline industry, from retail, from the arts, musicians, actors, and artists.

All came together and were the most interested and intrigued students I have ever had. People who have recovered from COVID-19 do not all recover completely, and I have been able to offer support on the phone for those seeking reassurance. 

In conversations with colleagues across the world, it became evident that the impact on staff of working with COVID-19 has been missed or misrepresented. A European-wide group of nurses has collected and collated experiences from 11 countries. We are looking for common themes to ensure that we can improve our care of patients and ourselves for the next time.

Art is a boundary-spanner and during the COVID-19 pandemic our boundaries, physical, professional, political, and personal, have all changed. Our connections with the environment, our loved ones and our work and school changed. Our connection with our health service has changed. 

Art has appeared in households and hospitals, rainbows arching across organisations to say ‘thank you NHS’. This time of unprecedented economic and social disruption has broken traditional sectoral boundaries and built new partnerships and new thinking. Perhaps it is now time to make art part of the new ways of working.

These images of staff have made policies and research papers personal. They have put a face to it: a face of someone who could be the first or last face a sick person sees. A face connected to the only hands you are allowed to hold. For the staff, the psychological toll of the past few months may well last years. 

To address the impact on the staff’s mental health it is important to acknowledge the strain COVID-19 has put on people and value those people. The recognition and reward needed is complex. Instilling pride in what has been achieved as well as support for lives lost, installing services that support staff’s wellbeing and instigating processes that value the staff and what they do. These portraits do just this.