While health care facilities can mean hope for the sick or wounded, they also mean stress, pain, sickness, and fear. Feelings of stress emerge when we wait for results, wait to be seen, or are in a room where something dreadful but necessary is about to happen to us or to someone we love. High stress levels have been shown to suppress the immune system and increase the pain patients experience.

This is where art can do the most good. Art does more than add beauty and humanity to hospital environments. A study conducted by the University of Florida showed that a well-designed art program can reduce stress, reduce demand for pain medication and shorten hospital stays by an average of a day. Let us help you help your patients.

The San Diego Fine Art Society, in coordination with your art committee, hospital staff and patient focus group, will craft a health care environment that not only benefits the patient, visitor, and caregiver, but the facility's reputation and bottom line.

"The effect on sickness of beautiful objects, of variety of objects and especially of brilliancy of color is hardly at all appreciated. People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too. Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by color and light, we do know this, they have an actual physical effect. Variety of form and brilliancy of color in the objects presented to patients are actual means of recovery." -Florence Nightengale