They'd spent seven hours hanging their paintings on the white walls of the narrow hallways in the Patient Care Centre of Royal Jubilee Hospital. But just as the nurses were preparing to leave, the doors at the end of the hall swung open.

"When a stretcher comes quickly, you know the patient is very sick," said Lynda McLeod, the woman behind Art by Nurses. "It was being pushed very quickly. And then, all of a sudden, people stopped."

She said the elderly man, jaundiced and sickly, managed to push himself up onto his elbow and said, "Can you go slowly?"

The stretcher pushers slowed down so the man could take in the paintings, photos and drawings along the wall. His family followed behind the stretcher.

"The family, when they got to the end of the hall, said, 'Thank you. We're going to be here a long time,' " McLeod said.

That was the first of many touching moments that McLeod never anticipated when she started Art by Nurses three years ago. It began as a website (artbynurses.com), a place where nurses around the country could share their art — a practice of "self-care" in a high-pressure field. Now, 15 of those works are hanging in the Healing Hallway of Royal Jubilee Hospital in an exhibit that will run through the end of December.

McLeod, who teaches nursing at Camosun College, says self-care is crucial in the field. She began making art early in her career, as a way to deal with the trauma she saw in the intensive care unit.

"Bearing witness was very disturbing," she said, "Especially being a visual artist — the visual part of it. So I needed a place to unpack."

At the time, she said, self-care was not part of nursing education — there was no network of people to talk to about the emotional impact of the work. Now, she says, the field of nursing has changed drastically. There are debriefing groups and reflection is taught as part of Camosun's curriculum. Even the line between art and science, traditionally bold, is being blurred.

"There's a real tug-of-war in nursing around the art and science," McLeod said. "I think the view of the future is that we do look at them together."

In her class, she welcomes University of Victoria theatre students to share alternative perspectives on empathy and violence prevention with her students.

Since starting the website, she has been invited to speak at conferences in Europe and the U.S. about the connection between art and healing.

Besides giving nurses a positive outlet for expression, studies show that art in hospitals has a measurable healing effect. A 1993 study published by Psychophysiology showed that patients recovering from heart surgery who were exposed to nature and abstract pictures had less anxiety, requested less pain medication and had a quicker post-operative recovery time than others. Another study, published in 1999, showed that critical-care patients who had a picture of a landscape on their walls needed less narcotic pain medication and left hospitals sooner.

The qualitative results are coming in at Royal Jubilee. McLeod recently received a note from one of her students on the cardiac floor. Her patients, who find walking very painful, have turned trips to the wall into a competition.

"It's very important for patients to get up and ambulate and its very difficult to motivate them to do that because it hurts," she said. Now it's a daily goal.

"In their chaos of trying to make sense of why they're sick and why they have to go through this, if it gives them one moment to come and feel like they're part of something . . . even if it's just to talk about something else besides their chemotherapy or the incredible pain they're feeling, that's what is intended."

asmart@timescolonist.com