STILL LIFE: A STORY OF CORRIDOR CARE
13.01.2025

Is Corridor Care treating people as paintings? These living paintings are not curated and placed there with care, but instead are leaning against walls, facing the wrong way, piled high, waiting and wanting to be seen. Our corridor collections of ‘living paintings’ are becoming part of the furniture, a usual scene, and so, they are unseen. Such a normalised picture of corridor health is distorting our idea of what and where care should be.

Imagine. You are at your most vulnerable and a picture hook becomes your drip hook. You are now hung on the wall, a picture of ill health. How can we accept treating people as pictures? How can we continue to create the conditions where a person is placed in a corridor, labelled and left on a wall, an exhibit of care. The aesthetics of nursing care is about how we use our senses and surroundings to create trust, safety, health, wellbeing and care.

Corridor care is the an aesthetic of nursing care. I cannot imagine the horror of feeling like a piece of the furniture, leaning against a corridor wall, unwell, unclothed, exposed. Corridor care is creating a still life exhibit of real people, real life imitating art. People who are sick, tired and terrified everyone is looking at them, and terrified no one is looking at all.