Hospital staff making music to support medical research

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The high pressure setting of a hospital ward can feel a million miles away from a concert hall. But a group of Australian medical professionals are bringing the two worlds together. Corpus Medicorum is a group of doctors, nurses and others from various hospitals who make music. And they're raising money for medical research along the way.

Transcript

00:00 Playing music has been a lifelong passion for Philip Antipa. Today he's in rehearsal

00:07 for an upcoming orchestral gala in Melbourne. But Philip is not only a skilled musician,

00:24 he's also the head of thoracic surgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Peter MacCallum

00:29 Cancer Centre. Twenty years ago the surgeon founded Corpus Medicorum, an orchestra made

00:36 up of health workers. We have nurses and physiotherapists and dentists and medical scientists and PhD

00:43 students. Corpus Medicorum is one of a handful of medical orchestras around the world and

00:53 is helping health workers cope with the gruelling demands of their profession. There's no capacity

00:58 to think about, "I wonder how the hospital's going, I wonder how that patient's going."

01:02 It's actually this set aside period of time where I'm just in the music. It can be quite

01:07 nerve-wracking to play a solo in a concert but at least no one's going to die if you

01:12 miss a note. Sonia Baldock played music professionally before going back to university to study intensive

01:23 care nursing. She not only plays with the orchestra, but sometimes takes her violin

01:30 to work. We know that physiologically it can bring your heart rate down so anyone who's

01:39 stressed, whether that be staff, patients, family members, we know that that sense of

01:44 peace comes from dropping that heart rate down. Corpus Medicorum performs regularly

01:49 in Melbourne and at venues around the world. Their performances have raised more than a

01:53 million dollars for lung cancer research and other projects over the past two decades.

01:59 When we're all in the orchestra together we might be a bunch of medical professionals

02:04 but we're experiencing this as a bunch of music lovers. It's intoxicating, it's addictive,

02:11 it's really an incredible thing to be part of. Healing hearts and saving lives.

02:19 (singing)

02:22 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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