Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity Launches New Art Appeal To Support Mental Health Patients

Our Charity intended to harness the power of art with our Inspiring Spaces Appeal, which needed to raise £170,000 to transform the clinical environment of our young mental health patients, helping to improve wellbeing and aid recovery.

Our hospital’s in-patient mental health facility, Parkview Clinic, located in Kings Heath, cares for young people aged 11-18 years old who are experiencing significant mental health illnesses, including severe anxiety, self-harm, psychosis and eating disorders. Patients can stay anywhere from between a couple of months to over a year, so the clinic quickly becomes a home away from home for them.

Studies have shown a patient’s environment has a direct impact on their experience, recovery and health outcomes, with inspiring artwork helping to improve levels of stress and anxiety, enabling them to participate more fully in their care. The areas within Parkview reflected a typical hospital environment, exposing patients to uninspiring, stark, sterile, white walls.

Our Inspiring Spaces Appeal was launched to change this. We partnered with Hospital Rooms, an arts and mental health charity, which collaborates with artists, service users and NHS mental healthcare specialists, like Parkview, to craft innovative artwork and creative programmes, to transform health spaces into places of hope, dignity and recovery.

Twelve well-known artists were commissioned to work with the patients at Parkview to develop art installations to be displayed across the clinic – from wards to communal spaces – giving the young people the opportunity to express themselves and engage meaningfully with contemporary art as part of their care and recovery.

Mark Brider, chief executive officer at Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity, said: “The hospital environment is an important part of the patient experience and this appeal helped improve it dramatically for our young people.  Engaging them in this process also gave them a sense of ownership and control of their space, elements that are often severely lacking in a mental health facility.

“We needed the help of the public to do this. By raising £170,000 we were able to completely transform the spaces in Parkview from a white and sterile environment to something colourful, creative and inspiring for our young people, giving them hope and supporting their recovery.”

Dan O’Mara, head of nursing at Parkview Clinic, part of Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, added: “”We were so thrilled to have the opportunity for our clinic to be transformed in this way, working with the Hospital Rooms team. The team really took the time to understand our current stark and clinical environment and how it can be improved to not only benefit the wellbeing of our young people, but our staff too.

“They also understood how important it was for our young people to be centrally involved in the process, so the environment reflects their opinions, tastes, thoughts and feelings. This project meant so much more to us than just something to look at. We enjoyed working with the artists to engage our young people, so the artwork could become part of the therapeutic experience we offer for them.”

Niamh White, co-founder and director of Hospital Rooms, said: “We were thrilled to be collaborating with Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust and its charity to create inspiring and transformative spaces for young people at Parkview Clinic. We believe this collaboration will have a lasting impact, shaped by the voices of those who use it.”

The artists who had been commissioned to support the transformation of Parkview were at varying stages of their career, from emerging artists to those who are world-renowned, and come from Birmingham, across the UK and even globally.

They included Exodus Crooks, a British-Jamaican multidisciplinary artist and educator based in the Midlands, who is interested in self-determination and how it is steered by religion and spirituality; Rhys Coren, a London-based artist working across animation, writing, performance, painted marquetry and furniture; plus Charley Peters, an artist whose work examines how digital culture shapes contemporary perception and has been exhibited internationally, with shows in the US, China and Poland.

The artists started a series of workshops with the patients at Parkview to develop the art installations, ensuring the environment reflected their tastes and feelings, while staying true to the artist’s style.