This ground-breaking book highlights and extends on the increasing number of research and practice collaborations between the disciplines of drama and nursing across the globe. Uniquely, it presents how drama-based interactive education can enable nursing students to develop an embodied understanding of sympathetic presence within a person-centred curriculum.

This text provides meaningful insights into how to cultivate approaches to be person-centred and sympathetically present in every interaction with others through the application of drama-based methods. The work described within seeks to show how applying drama can help people perform more effective person-centred practices, with applied drama approaches which are in turn more person-centred.

By focusing on the author’s innovative doctoral research study, this book seeks to show how taking part in expertly designed drama practice alongside nursing education leads nurses towards engaging more in person-centredness, overcoming their personal vulnerabilities, showing an enhanced ability to attend to others, and a greater understanding of how to perform presence. Meanwhile showing applied drama practitioners how they can understand facilitation practice through sympathetic presence to discover practical ways to approach an aesthetics of care in their practice.

This book offers a process for nurse educators and applied drama artists to work together in a mutual exchange, where both fields can contribute specialised expertise in developing the next generation of person-centred practitioners.