Creative Review
GP’s waiting rooms and hospital corridors aren’t generally designed as welcoming environments, and it’s a lucky person that isn’t familiar with the special NHS palette of greige – liberally applied across doctors’ offices and health centres all over the UK. But while there’s definitely a way to go, there are signs that we’re waking up to the ways art and design can improve things.
Arts organisation Vital Arts – which sits within the Barts Health NHS Trust – is at the forefront of this. Charitably-funded, it runs a hospital arts programme that commissions new, site-specific works by the likes of Morag Myerscough and Chris Haughton, as well as a participation programme that brings dance, music and literature and creative projects directly to patients across five east London hospitals.
CR Annual Client of the Year: Vital Arts
Artwork for the Children’s Hospital at The Royal London by Chris Haughton, commissioned by Vital Art
“Each year, as part of the CR Annual, we choose a Client of the Year to recognise the importance of a client in producing great work. For 2016, that honour goes to Vital Arts!
Vital Arts’ projects have frequently appeared both in our Annual and in regular issues of Creative Review over the past few years. As the arts organisation for the Barts Health NHS Trust, it delivers projects across five hospitals in east London.
In these times of austerity, the case for art and design within our hospitals can be a tough one to make. But Vital Arts’ projects are always firmly rooted in the wellbeing of patients, staff and the wider hospital community. Its programmes transform the experience of being in hospital for patients, visitors and staff. And they work. Research has shown that carefully curated, appropriate art projects within hospitals can, for example, reduce anxiety and depression. The group’s arts participation programme, furthermore, creates practical solutions such as employing a chef and nutritionist to create a recipe book for renal patients who have to follow a strict diet.
Vital Arts employs creativity to make a real difference to the lives of the vulnerable. And we are delighted to be able to recognise its contribution to making some of the most traumatic times of life more bearable. “
