TalkingAllowed

Talking Allowed is led by Lisa Harrison and Patrick Morris. For over 15 years we have worked together at the intersection of arts, well-being and education, launching Talking Allowed in 2017. We are passionate about finding ways to improve the human interaction between, and amongst, healthcare professionals, patients and relatives. Our training directly addresses the significant dilemmas that challenging conversations can present to clinicians, whilst also recognising the importance of prioritising patients’ and relatives’ needs.

Our continued involvement in theatre brings a unique quality to the work we do: health professionals of all grades tell us unfailingly how helpful they find it to watch and interact with skilled actors in role. Combined with expert facilitation and our proven abilities to draw upon the experience in the room, our training creates an ideal learning environment for all participants.

Lisa Harrison is an experienced facilitator, role-player and creative practitioner. Her background is in theatre. She toured extensively across Europe, Canada and the UK, performing in venues such as Warwick Arts Centre and West Yorkshire Playhouse. For many years a Visiting Lecturer at the Universities of Birmingham, Wolverhampton and De Montfort, she now uses the arts more broadly in educational, medical and community settings, working with people from all backgrounds and of all ages and abilities. She initiates creative projects which bring people together who might otherwise not meet, for example working in fragmented diverse communities, and with the lonely and the isolated living with dementia. She first collaborated with Patrick Morris in 1999 on a project which focused on attitudes to death. This sowed the seed for their long-term partnership, co-facilitating training with a focus on difficult conversations.

Patrick Morris has worked in the field of medical communication for over 15 years. He is a skilled facilitator and roleplayer, influenced primarily by a lifetime working as an arts practitioner. He is Co-Artistic Director of Menagerie Theatre Company in Cambridge where he runs the Ideas Stage, a programme of artistic work which has contemporary research as its inspiration. Current projects include a partnership with The Good Death Project in Cambridge to develop engagement workshops around death, dying and mortality. Other recent projects: ‘Not Quite Right’, with The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute in Cambridge; ‘The Great Austerity Debate’, a forum theatre play about austerity which toured England; ‘Human Rights! Bloody Human Rights!’ with Amnesty International and Queen Mary College London; and ‘Pictures of You’, a collaboration with the MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, exploring research into bipolar disorder.