معرفی
Deborah Padfield serves as Associate Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (UCL), where she also earned her PhD, and Reader in Arts & Health Humanities at St George's School of Health and Medical Sciences, City St George's, University of London. Her distinctive career bridges visual arts and healthcare, focusing on how images can transform patient-clinician communication in pain management contexts.
Her educational background includes a PhD from UCL, though specific undergraduate and master's information isn't detailed in the provided text. Her academic journey reflects an interdisciplinary path that combines artistic practice with medical humanities.
Dr. Padfield's research centers on visual communication in pain management, particularly how photographs can facilitate improved interaction between patients and clinicians. She argues that visual representations can capture aspects of pain difficult to express verbally, helping patients maintain control over how their pain is visualized. Her work emphasizes collaborative approaches, bringing together diverse expertise to forge connections and suspend critical judgment toward unfamiliar methodologies. She firmly believes that interdisciplinary collaboration is essential for addressing global health challenges and that the arts are vital for health promotion and wellbeing.
Her publication record reveals a clear trajectory from early explorations of visual language for pain communication to sophisticated interdisciplinary studies examining intercultural understanding and communication tools. The works demonstrate increasing complexity in methodology and scope, moving from single-institution collaborations to international projects spanning multiple continents.
- Sciart Research Award
- UCL Arts in Health Award
- UCL Provosts Award for Public Engagement 2012
- British Pain Society Artist of the Year 2012
- UCL Public Engagement Beacon Bursary 2015
- Lancet Highlights photography competition 2017
Dr. Padfield supervises BA3 independent research projects and MA dissertations at the Slade School of Fine Art, provides individual tutorials for students, and examines internal and external PhD theses. Her grant portfolio includes Arts Council funding for the 'Perceptions of Pain' exhibition, knowledge exchange projects in India, and collaborations with Osaka University, Japan. Most recently (2023-2024), she served as co-PI on an international workshop series exploring service user voice and agency through arts and therapies, involving participants from over 15 countries.
She directs the 'Open Spaces' program at St George's, which creates dialogue between science/medicine and arts/humanities, and leads the 'Visualising pain' project developing international pain communication tools. Her 'Pain Cards' resource represents a practical application of her research, designed as a communication tool for NHS pain clinics.
