Patient Voices operates as a social enterprise dedicated to the creation and distribution of these important stories. Now home to over 1,000 stories of health and illness, tragic losses and miraculous recoveries, the Programme is widely respected as being the only resource of its kind in the world, receiving over two million total hits per annum on the website and with stories being used by, among others, the UK Chief Medical and Nursing Officers, and in schools of medicine and healthcare throughout the English speaking world and beyond.

Pip and Tony are considered to be the world’s leading practitioners in digital storytelling in healthcare. The methodology developed for creating Patient Voices Reflective digital stories has been acknowledged as a valid method of gathering qualitative data by the UK National Audit Office, among others, while the three-stage ethical consent and release process they have developed is recognised as an exemplar of good practice in digital storytelling and other forms of participatory research.

Pip and Tony bring a range of knowledge and expertise from their past lives: Tony has degrees in physics and astronomy and astrophysics and many years’ experience working in the computer industry, while Pip has degrees in English Literature and Lifelong Learning and worked for many years in adult education, writing and editing books and open learning programmes. Her PhD investigates the transformative potential of digital storytelling in healthcare.

The Patient Voices Programme has won a number of awards, including the 2010 British Medical Journal award for Excellence in Healthcare Education. It sprang from, and sits within, the work of Pilgrim Projects Limited, an education consultancy specialising in the development of high quality open, distance and e-learning programmes across a range of sectors.

Kurin also founded the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake and has worked to save cultural heritage endangered by natural disasters and human conflict. In the U.S. he leads the Smithsonian’s partnership with FEMA on the Heritage Emergency National Task Force which responds to damage to cultural resources in natural disasters. Internationally, he helped draft an international treaty to safeguard living cultural heritage now ratified by 180 countries. He has worked closely with the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security and with local partners in Iraq, Syria, Mali, Afghanistan and currently Ukraine to safeguard heritage, identify looted art, and monitor terrorist activity and war crimes directed against cultural targets. He has served as Smithsonian liaison to the White House Historical Association, the U.S. President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities, the intergovernmental Cultural Heritage Coordinating Committee, and the Federal Interagency Panel for World Heritage. An anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago, he has authored seven books including The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects, taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Arsht-Rockefeller Resilience Center.