DialysART

DialysART is a visual arts program offered once per week by a partnership between Peninsula Health and Frankston Arts Centre to promote health and wellbeing for dialysis patients. Unlike most community or group art programs, DialysART takes place within the hospital unit, while patients are undergoing treatment attached to their dialysis machines. Most patients visit the Haemodialysis Unit for a five- hour treatment session three times per week on alternate days. Whilst undergoing treatment, the patients sit in their chair for the whole of this time and are connected to tubes and machines that purify their blood; a job that would otherwise be done by the kidneys.

Chanudi, a registered Arts Therapist, visits the unit once a week to engage with the patients in art making. Art Therapy encourages positive engagement and creative participation using visual art as a form of expression. The focus of Art Therapy is on the process of art making and therapeutic engagement and it does not necessarily target on a perfect outcome of a completed work of art.

Many of the patients-artists (participants) at DialysArt have never considered painting or drawing before, so their involvement in the program starts with gaining confidence while gradually learning techniques. Some other participants choose to only have a chat and not engage in art making. At DialysArt, Art Therapy program is delivered as a person-lead and person-centred program where the Arts Therapist works with all the participants individually in a group setting to facilitate the art program tailor made to everyone’s functional capacity while undergoing treatment. Mobility is limited while being connected to the machines, making it a challenging task for most of participants to actively engage in art making. This creates further challenge and sometimes modifications or hand over hand assistance is needed to assist their engagement. It’s great to see how some of the participants have overcome this challenging environmental barrier by adapting to use their non-dominant hand when their dominant hand is immobile being connected to the blood purifying machine. The works displayed here may have taken many days and weeks, and so much effort put in to be completed for these very reasons as well.

We would like to thank the current Art Therapist, Chanudi Wickramasinha, and Unit Manager, Sandra McDonald, for their support of the program. Thanks also to the programs founding Art Therapist, Melissa Banks, and the many wonderful Art Therapists who have lead the program across the years, including Lorin, Jennie and Corrie.