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Long abstract:

Including artists in health care is a promising new trend. It is however, conceptually unclear what art-as-care could be, and even less how to evaluate the goodness of these attempts. Evaluative methods from biomedicine managed to establish' the effect' of art-as-care contributions, but seem to miss the mark on what it is exactly that different art forms may contribute. Moreover, Evidence Based Methods also tend to disturb the practices they want to evaluate rather than supporting them. In this presentation I present alternative methods based on ethnography to see how these might contribute to evaluating art-as-care, by designing non-intrusive methods and supportive methods. I explore how we might think of succesful art-as-care projects by analysing their sustainability, i.e. by establishing lasting relationships between artists, health care workers and scientists rather than one time events. This includes economic concerns about income for makers, but also the continuity of relationships through circularity (re-using the same) and translation (adapting an intervention).