This comprehensive guide aims at Harnessing the Arts to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in Clinical Practice, Health Promotion, Professional Education, and National Policy Making.

In a world grappling to manage the complexities of the challenges to population and planetary health, this pioneering publication emphasises the skills needed for creativity, the arts as well as science, to address 21st-century wellbeing. It presents educational content and global examples of nurses, the most trusted, most connected, and mostly female profession being innovative change makers, using the arts in their practice and delivering all of the United National 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The science of nursing is evident in the visible actions and viable evidence used to support and sustain practice. But what of the art of nursing? The invisible actions that create the space and pace of care, that control the communication and commitments and so the trust between people, that maintain the Caritas and the connections even when the people are gone. Whether at a personal level, when people are unable to articulate what the nurse did, ‘they were just there’, at the professional level when the debate is about undoing task based nursing, hierarchical power and gendered inequalities and assumptions, or at a structural level where health is a right for some and a privilege for others, the science does not give us all the answers. The arts can and are helping in a way that brings different ways of knowing into health, and into nursing, and into the way we all need to unite to deliver the sustainable development goals. 

This book aims at empowering nurses to integrate the arts into their practice and deliver all of the SDGs; It is a true transformative education book using case studies from across the world.

Dr Marion Lynch is a global health consultant, nurse, researcher, and educator with 40 years of experience in NHS and global health. She is an expert in health system strengthening to improve equity and quality working with governments and charities to develop national policies, health professional education and patient pathways. She is the founder of Art of Nursing a Community Interest Company which brings the arts into clinical education and service evaluation. As Associate Dean in the NHS for 20 years she has designed and delivered health professional education, has written and taught two MBA Global Health Leadership and Management modules, Resource Management and Transforming Health Services. She now works globally working with charities and governments to improve health and healthcare. She helped design the content for the Masters in Global Nursing Leadership with the University of Global Health Unity in Rwanda where she was also a gender mentor. In 2024 she received the British Empire Medal from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office for services to women’s and children on Africa.

Her research examines the impact of global healthcare innovations, often including the evolution of nursing and the work of nurses, and, how the arts help health. Her Doctorate explored how the arts challenge the epistemological approach to medical education and she has been an advocate for creative health ever since. This led to an invitation to be a Gates Foundation Global Goalkeeper, and she was invited to United Nations linked meetings in New York in 2022 and 2023 to disrupt traditional thinking about the Sustainable Development Goals. She is a Trustee of the Foundation of Nursing Studies, a Visiting Professor University of West London, and an Honorary Adviser to the Tropical Health Education Trust (THET). This combination of life in nursing, the arts, and global health brings the ideas within this book to life. Her skills in education design ensure the content is engaging and evidence-based, is practically focused and patient-centred, and is written to bring creativity to nurses' roles and skills across the SDGs, with people, populations, and the planet.