One evening each month, Dr. Minh-Dung Truong and his colleagues at CLSC de Côte-des-Neiges set aside their thermometers and stethoscopes and pick up paintbrushes and canvases instead. Together, they discover the joys of painting.
For two hours, Dr. Truong leads members of the SAPA Home Care team in exploring their creativity and producing their own works of art. It’s the family physician’s way of sharing a passion for painting that he’s nurtured over a lifetime.
The purpose isn’t to create the next Picasso: It’s to let staff unwind, express themselves and enjoy the company of colleagues outside of work hours.
“Painting has allowed me to experience a feeling of liberation in my own professional life, and I’d like others to benefit from the same thing,” Dr. Truong says.
There are professional benefits as well, he believes: Artistic self-expression can boost skills that are valued in health care, he says.
“Medicine involves human relations, and human relations require a lot of flexibility, patience and creativity. That’s precisely what artistic practice brings.
“Creativity helps with problem solving. It can help you become more self-confident and a better listener to your patients.”
Dr. Minh-Dung Truong
The courses are the fruit of collaboration between Dr. Truong and Maha Ghozayel, an Occupational Therapist in the Home Care program for SAPA (Support Program for the Autonomy of Seniors). In the summer of 2024, when Ms. Ghozayel was active in the group’s social committee, Dr. Truong approached her to see if she thought there would be interest in a painting class.
An informal survey indicated there was—and the courses have remained in popular demand ever since. Since they began in early 2025, they have attracted nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, patient attendants, social workers and at least one physician.
“People adore it,” says Ms. Ghozayel, who tried one class as a novice and has been hooked ever since. “Dr. Truong is a really good teacher. He shows us step by step how to reach a result, and he does it in a way that puts people at ease. He brings out extraordinary things in our paintings.”
Mischma Oscar Joseph, a Social Work Technician, painted a portrait of a colleague during one of Dr. Truong’s classes. “He didn’t put pressure on us to do a perfect portrait—he just encouraged us to go with our creativity,” she says. “It was a very good initiation, and I found it inspiring.”
In exchange for a $15 contribution per participant, Dr. Truong provides easels, paintbrushes, canvases and acrylic paints for each session, which are held in a conference room at the CLSC’s Plaza Site; in summer, participants sometimes head outdoors to city parks or marinas. Dr. Truong begins each class with a brief introduction to a different theme in painting—it might be the styles of fauvism or pointillism, colour or composition, still life or landscapes. Then, participants get to work on their creation, completing an entire canvas before the class is over.
Dr. Truong offers individual guidance throughout the session and gives feedback at the end of the class. Participants say he is unfailingly positive, calm and constructive. Ms. Ghozayel recalls completing one canvas that she thought looked like a child’s painting. “It was horrible!” she recalls.
Dr. Truong saw it differently. “He said it was like a Matisse,” she says, laughing.
For Dr. Truong, teaching allows him to share a passion for drawing and painting that began as a boy growing up in Vietnam. After emigrating to Canada as a teenager in 1979, he went on to earn his medical degree at McGill University and taught family medicine at the university as a clinical professor for six years. But his interest in art never left him. Even while practising medicine at the CLSC, he took art classes in the evening at the École des Beaux-arts de Montréal Artus, a private school founded in the late 1990s.
He believes that art can offer a form of release to the stresses of healthcare work, something that was especially evident during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When you create art, you feel joy and freedom.”
Dr. Minh-Dung Truong
“Happiness and inner peace are at the core of the whole idea. The purpose is to have fun and feel liberated, to make new friends in the process and to make time and space for yourself.”
An average of eight to 10 participants take part in each class, whose colourful artworks now proudly decorate desks and shelves around the SAPA offices. The department has even devoted wall space in a hallway to display the paintings for passersby. No one will mistake the canvases as masterpieces destined for the Louvre—but for sheer fun and self-expression, they are just what the doctor ordered.
