Prue Thimbleby is ABMU Arts Co-ordinator
Prue is a willow artist and digital story facilitator and has over 20 years of experience in delivering and managing participatory Arts projects.
Prue trained as a nurse and midwife and then began to run Arts projects. In 1995 she did a BA in Arts Practice in the Community at Middlesex University and in 2005 she moved to Wales and did an MA in Community Storytelling at the University of South Wales. www.pruethimbleby.net

Current Projects:
Patient Stories, Staff Wellbeing through drama, Dance for Falls prevention, Storytelling for Wellbeing Cafe, Music Festivals, Reading Friends.....

Patient Stories
Stories can be from patients, relatives or staff about their first hand experience
Patient Story work is Deep Listening
WHY?

• To help the teller process what is happening to them
• To communicate and share best practice
• To advocate and improve our practice

Patient stories are ideal for learning and improvement - they build empathy in the listener and they are very memorable.
WHAT?
There are several models of patient story work in the Health Board

• Some people have done training with 1000 lives and with the RCN leadership programme
• The communications team produce video stories
• The Arts team supports the digital storytelling model in ABMU

Digital stories are voice recordings put together with images to create a short video
The model has three basic principles

1. it is a first person story
2. it is always short – usually under 3 minutes
3. the storyteller remains the director of the story

Some examples:

Storytelling for Health
see more at Story4Health