ARTICU : Personalized Artwork to Ease Bereavement in the ICU

Background:
As modern medicine continues to advance, there is a trend for clinicians to become more distanced from their patients. There is far more to science and medicine than diseases, laboratory values, radiology images, and treatments. Dr. Azad's is passionate about countering this trend, cultivating knowledge about the experiences of grief in the face of death, and promoting humanism on a larger scale within Canadian hospitals. ARTICU will prepare Dr. Azad for fostering art as a vehicle to connect with patients and their families as well as colleagues.

Art is personal and emotional. Its role alleviating grief has yet to be explored. The impact of personalized paintings to honour deceased patients has not been studied. Accordingly, the overall objective of ARTICU is to create personalized paintings by Dr. Marisa Azad, to honour the deceased, using them as a platform for narrative medicine to better understand how families experience and navigate the grieving process.

SPECIFIC AIMS:
(1) To ease bereavement in family members through personalized paintings created in celebration of the life of their deceased loved one.

(2) To better understand the grieving process in the ICU by using personalized paintings as a narrative medicine tool

The Artwork of Marisa Azad