posted on 2025-07-09, 15:03authored bySarah YardleySarah Yardley, Laura Copsey, Rewilding Healthcare Crew Trellis 5
<h2>About the project</h2><p dir="ltr">Bonding over a shared love of sailing, Sarah and Laura developed “Rewilding Healthcare,” which reimagines experiences of the healthcare system. Working with people who have professional and/or personal experience of serious mental or physical illness, Sarah and Laura ran series of creative workshops in partnership with <a href="https://codydock.org.uk/" target="_blank">Cody Dock.</a> These used maritime metaphors, and the language of sailing and island living, to rethink risk, safety and choice in healthcare. </p><ul><li><a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture-online/place-our-making-multisensory-exhibition-about-east-london" target="_blank">Trellis: A Place of Our Making</a></li></ul><h2>Meet the collaborators</h2><p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.kingston.ac.uk/staff/profile/laura-copsey-1343/" target="_blank">Laura Copsey</a> is a London-based artist and arts educator. With a background in occupational therapy, illustration and music, she creates interdisciplinary and collaborative works, live experiences, expeditions and socially engaged projects. Laura's practice is inspired by heritage, geo-poetics and hydrofiction, often in relation to particular places or bodies of water.</p><p dir="ltr"><br><a href="https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/52841-sarah-yardley" target="_blank">Dr Sarah Yardley</a> is a palliative medicine doctor and qualitative researcher based in the Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department, UCL. Her story-based research focuses on how people engage in the daily, often hidden, work of healthcare. She aims to include those who feel they “don’t fit” in healthcare systems, advocating for multi-voiced understandings that prompt positive change and working with communities to explore what matters most when someone has a serious illness.</p><p dir="ltr"><br>Rewilding Healthcare is a partnership with Julia Briscoe and colleagues at <a href="https://codydock.org.uk/" target="_blank">Cody Dock</a>. Around 40 people have engaged with the workshops – as Lifeboat Crew - many of whom have multiple roles - bringing their experiences as healthcare service users, carers, advocates and in their professional work in healthcare teams.</p><p><br></p><p dir="ltr">Here we share our "waiting room" newspaper - a Riso production created at Rabbit Road Press to represent lived experiences</p>
Funding
Trellis 5
The Healthcare Improvement Studies (THIS) Institute fellowship award