Heartbeats is a new project between Creative Minds and The Blahs to look at how we can use arts and creativity to make the stay better for children and their families on the Children’s Ward.

We want to understand what it’s like spending time here and how music and art could help; through providing a welcome distraction, a feeling of calm and something meaningful for children and their grownups to do together.

We believe that the people who know best what is needed are the people who experience this every day – both our supportive staff and the children and families themselves. So, over the next six months we’ll be finding lots of different ways to gather everyone’s ideas.

We’ll be running workshops for service users connected to the Children’s Ward – these will be enjoyable and engaging sessions where they’ll do accessible creative arts activities at the same time as thinking about how we can use art to make their experience better.

We purposefully don’t know what the outcome of this project will be yet as we believe that the most successful and useful thing will come about when staff, service users and artists all bring their respective expertise to bear. What we do know is that we are looking to create some kind of interactive arts experience (most likely using digital technology) that children can do whilst they are staying on the ward that will help them feel more creative, calm and pass the time.

There are lots of opportunities to get involved, so to find out more please get in touch with:
Sophie Peel, Project Coordinator – SophieJo.Peel@swyt.nhs.uk