Beyond Metrics: The Role of Arts-Based Research in Transforming Healthcare Culture

Abstract

In healthcare, organizational culture and patient safety are often defined through protocols, policies, and performance metrics. While essential, these structures rarely capture the emotional and relational dimensions that shape how people work, care, and connect in high pressure environments. This editorial explores how arts-based research offers a rigorous and transformative approach to understanding and strengthening healthcare culture. Grounded in qualitative and constructionist paradigms, arts-based research integrates creative processes including music, movement, visual art, and storytelling into inquiry. These approaches enable clinicians to express and examine lived experiences of trust, empathy, moral distress, meaning, and belonging that may be difficult to articulate through words alone. The article highlights the vital role of community arts-based organizations as partners in this work, contributing expertise in creative facilitation, emotional translation, and collective reflection. Through collaborative projects and artistic outputs such as performances, exhibitions, and participatory workshops, arts-based research makes embodied forms of evidence visible and accessible, fostering dialogue across professional hierarchies and supporting organizational learning and change. As burnout and workforce strain intensify globally, culture transformation has become an ethical imperative, and safety cannot be separated from psychological wellbeing. Arts-based research does not replace evidence-based practice but expands what counts as evidence by integrating measurable and experiential dimensions of quality and safety. Ultimately, the integration of arts-based research into acute and critical care settings supports the rehumanization of healthcare by affirming medicine as both a science and an art and by positioning creativity, relationship, and imagination as central to sustainable cultures of care.