Legend has it that there is another hospital located on the site of Calderdale Royal – a hospital full of music that exists in another dimension …
Click on one of the links above to enter the other hospital and make some music!
Bored on the Ward is a music-making game, created by Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah and Creative Minds, in partnership with staff, children and families at Calderdale Royal Hospital.
Bored on the Ward is an app providing an interactive arts experience that children can do whilst they are staying on the children’s ward that will help them feel more creative, calm and pass the time. It has been designed collaboratively by families, writer Matthew Bellwood, graphic designer Chandni Soren, game developers SLAP Collective, musicians Nicolas Lewis and James Mabbett, Epilepsy Nurses, the Play Team and the hospital’s Youth Forum. Bored on the Ward is part of ‘Heartbeats’, a project looking at how we can use arts and creativity to make hospital stays better for children and their families.
We wanted to understand what it’s like spending time in hospital 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 the supportive staff and the children and families themselves. So, over the past two years we found lots of different ways to gather everyone’s ideas through arts activities and music workshops – take a look at the Gallery above for some of the children’s creations, from designing their ideal room to creating characters out of clay.
We began to think about ways in which the service users could still make music and be creative, even if the artists were not physically present. Our solution was to create a computer game that would offer those playing an opportunity to create new tracks using preloaded electronic samples.
To generate further ideas for the game, we ran some extended sessions with children and young people who were being supported by Calderdale Royal’s epilepsy team. Each participant designed a character for the game, along with a piece of music and set of opening titles for an imaginary hospital drama set on the ward.
All this work was then handed over to the writer, musicians, designer and game developers. The result is Bored on the Ward! We hope you enjoy it…
To find out more please get in touch with:
creativityandhealth@swyt.nhs.
Children and young people lead us in exploring important stories with artists, families, schools, and students. Here are their stories:
