Health Care Fine Art

Art for Healing - Angus Whyte interview

5-minute interview with Angus Whyte the Executive Director of Art for Healing.

To learn more about Art for Healting, the website is www.artforhealing.org

The website says this about their history:

Founded in 1981, Art for Healing has established a permanent loan collection of well over 2,000 original prints, drawings, paintings, and sculptures worth more than $2 million. Today, hundreds of these works line the halls and fill the walls of numerous community spaces, enhancing the quality of life for the ill, their caregivers, and loved ones.

Art for Healing relies on private grants and individual giving to cover expenses for matting, framing, storage and operations.

Design Loves a Depression?

These classic Eames chairs were designed during lean times

The title "Design Loves a Depression" caught my eye in last Sunday's New York times. Who are they kidding? I don't buy the argument! but here are some quotes:

• The pain of layoffs notwithstanding, the design world could stand to come down a notch or two — and might actually find a new sense of relevance in the process.
  
  
• Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials
  
  
• In the lean years ahead, “there will be less design, but much better design...What designers do really well is work within constraints, work with what they have...
  
  
• if President-elect Barack Obama delivers anything like a W.P.A, we could be standing on the brink of one of the most productive periods of design ever

To read the full article by Michael Cannell in the New York Times, click here

The End of Wall Street (for Dummies)

The financial crisis affects all of us. It affects us at work and it affects us at home. If you want to understand what happened, why it happened and what happens next I strongly encourage you to watch three short videos on the Wall Street Journal's website.

They call this series "The End of Wall Street". I tacked on "for Dummies" at the end to communicate that they use plain English to explain this ongoing disaster. The editing was "edgy" and fresh in each of these 8-minutes long videos. 

I have provided direct links to each of the three videos (see the "click here" below). 

Part One: What Happened Click here

The housing bubble inflated and burst, and the easy money led to the collapse of Wall Street's biggest financial institutions.

Part Two: Why it Happened Click here

This occurred because they created hard-to-understand derivatives that Warren Buffett once called "weapons of financial mass destruction"

Part Three: What Happens Next Click here

No one has any idea what is going to happen next. But it is clear that the US Financial System has been destroyed.

Critical - What We Can Do About the HealthCare Crisis

Everyone involved in the use of art in hospitals needs needs to understand the crisis in HealthCare and the possible solutions. This is certain to affect your work and your family.

One of quickest ways to learn about this is to read Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis by Tom Daschle. Daschle is worth hearing from since he will be in the center of activity on this issue as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in Obama's Cabinet.

Quotes from the book:

• Our system is fundamentally broken, and decades of failed incremental measures have proven that we need a comprehensive approach to fix it
  
• We are paying top dollar for mediocre results
  
• We are the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee necessary health care to all of its citizens
  
• Medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States, accounting for about half of them.
  
• We seem to assume that high-tech medicine can only be better than low-tech medicine, that more medical care is better, and that more aggressive is better. Yet sometimes it isn't so.
  
• 31% of every dollar spent on healthcare in the United States is consumed by administrative costs. In Canada the percentage is less than 17%.
  
• Affordable coverage for small business owners and self-employed individuals is probably the biggest challenge that we have...
  
• Young adults are the largest and fastest growing group of uninsured. They also are likely to visit the emergency room with an injury, placing themselves and their family at considerable financial risk.
  
• Some people warn that covering everybody will lead to waiting lists and healthcare rationing. But the United States has its own type of rationing - rationing based on income, insurance status and illness.

Daschle proposes creating a Federal Health Board. This would be modeled on the Federal Reserve to “offer a public framework within which a private health-care system can operate more effectively and efficiently — insulated from political pressure yet accountable to elected officials and the American people.”

This well-written book is a quick-read and is available on Amazon for $16. Click here

Chinese painters devastated by recession

Thomas L. Friedman

Buying oil paintings from China can be a great way to save money on a hospital art project. But apparently the painters have been hit by the economic crisis just like we have.

I had no idea that many of those oil paintings that hang in hotel rooms and starter homes across America are actually produced by just one Chinese village, Dafen, north of Hong Kong. And I had no idea that Dafen’s artist colony — the world’s leading center for mass-produced artwork and knockoffs of masterpieces — had been devastated by the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble.

This quote is from the December 21st New York Times editorial by Thomas Friedman. It is called "China to the Rescue? Not!".  To read it click here.

To read a previous post on this blog "Bargain Paintings from China", click here.

Health care facilities feel the pinch

The Cleveland Clinic started a hiring and salary freeze across the 33,000-worker health system.

Healthcare is supposed to be the part of the economy that is safe in an economic downturn, right? It is not turning out to be that way according to a recent Associated Press article by Linda Johnson.

Jeff Selberg, a hospital CEO in Denver summarizes it best: "We feel like the wave is coming, but it hasn't hit yet," he said, "and we don't know how big this wave is going to be."

Highlights from the article:

• Hospital closings and mergers are on the way, industry analysts predict.

• Most endangered are rural hospitals and urban ones in areas with excess hospital beds and lots of poor, uninsured patients.

• Many hospitals have already begun to make staff reductions.

• Hospitals are being squeezed by tight credit, higher borrowing costs and a jump in patients — many recently unemployed or otherwise under-insured.

To read the full article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, click here.

Thanks to Charlie Peltason for sending me this article. He sent it with this comment: "How can this NOT affect art and health care?"

I Have a Dream - Universal Health Care

Asperitas endeana_8104

Could anything good come out of the current economic crisis? I dream that this may finally be the time for America to adopt Universal Health Care.

Why would such a deep crisis trigger this change?
Millions of Americans are loosing their jobs. With job loss comes a loss of Health Insurance. This will be a wake-up call for many people; they will have to face what it means to not have health insurance.

Even those who do not loose their jobs will see friends and family suddenly without heathcare coverage. I hope most people find this morally wrong and that they will demand that the problem be fixed; fixed politically.

As a physician for the last 30-years I have always supported the idea of Universal Health Care. I have worked as a doctor in New Zealand and Denmark and I can tell you from direct experience that universal health coverage works and it works well. All other developed countries on earth have universal health coverage except the US. It is time for us to fix this inequity.

What will the implications be on the use of Art in HealthCare? If you look at hospitals in Europe, Canada, Asia and Australia you will see that even though they have universal health coverage they build new fancy hospitals and they still buy art. We will too.

Do recessions breed conservative architecture?

The Sage Gateshead

Do recessions really do breed more conservative architecture; a flight to safety?

That is what Richard Lacayo explores on  Time magazine's Architecture Blog - Looking Around. Click here to read his post on this topic.

British architect David Chipperfield believes that "a prolonged recession would mean less flamboyant design, fewer buildings that rely on extravagant departures from the 90 degree angle."

I would add that hospital architecture is never flamboyant, even during economic booms. That was covered in the post "Why No Cool Looking Hospitals?"

GSA Contracts - Selling Art to the Government

Logo for the General Services Administration (GSA)

We have just finished our application to get GSA Certification. Why should someone interested in the use of Art in Hospitals go through all the paperwork? GSA Certification means you are much more likely to be considered for US Government Hospitals:

• VA Hospitals
• Military Hospitals

Without a  GSA contract you can still do business with them, but they can not order more than $3000 from you per project.

To learn more:
Wikipedia Overview of GSA: Click here
GSA Official Site: Click here

Healthcare Sector a Bright Spot

Contract Magazine editor Jennifer Busch reflects on how the economic downturn will affect Architectural and Design firms.  In October she wrote that the bad news out of Wall Street had not yet begun to filter down to A&D firms. But in her editorial she wrote:

... have no doubt that leaner times are coming...

And once again, the healthcare sector may prove to be a bright spot in the gathering gloom.Whether it's infrastructure issues like the number of aging facilities that can put off renovation or replacement no longer, the physical requirement for new, state-of-the-art spaces to house advanced medical technology, social issues like the increasing sophistication of healthcare consumers in their demand for high-quality facilities, or demographic influences like the impact of our aging population, the healthcare industry continues to offer considerable new business opportunities...

Jennifer Bush is the Editor-in-Chief of Contract Magazine. To read her full editorial, click here.