Comics And Healthcare

The Comics Journal is an award-winning quarterly magazine and the latest issue is dedicated to Comics And Healthcare, highlighting how comics creators are affected by illness and our healthcare system. It’s an honor to have the publishers see the relevance of my graphic recording work to that theme and ask me to share it in their magazine.

Alece Birnbach drawing a vision map for healthcare

Vision map showing how healthcare will improve lives by 2030

Comics created by patients are being used as a resource for doctors and nurses to better understand the patient experience. They can also facilitate difficult discussions between patients, healthcare workers, and family members, ultimately creating more empathy.

While graphic recording is not the same as creating comics, both use hand-drawn pictures and words to tell a story.  The impact of using pictures and words together make an imprint on our minds in a way that using them independently can't.  

The stories I tell are not my own.  It’s my job to remain objective and listen, synthesize and draw what I’m hearing in real-time; in this case a vision for how healthcare might evolve by the year 2030.  This 4’x16’ vision map was created over the course of two days by gathering ideas, personal stories, and anecdotes from attendees at the Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals (ARHP) Conference. 

Common themes emerged revealing the amount of care, passion and concern our healthcare providers have for patients. The Vison Map exposes how they all share a passion for improving the lives of their patients and how much they’re willing to work together to achieve that goal.
 
I’ve used this process for other clients too, and each time the themes that rise to the surface shine a light on how much they have in common. 
 
Visual stories facilitate empathy, shared understanding, and collaboration. Most importantly we have the ability to use them as a tool to inspire a better future.