Step Exhibitions
Hospital Rooms National Digital Art School Programme – Hospital Rooms
Nominee Information
Hospital Rooms has been commissioning world-class artists to transform inpatient mental health units with extraordinary artworks since its founding in 2016. When Covid-19 hit and hospitals went into lockdown, our team and partner artists couldn’t continue to work on these wards, which look after people with severe and enduring mental illness and we knew that pandemic restrictions were not only likely to significantly reduce access to the arts for these patient groups, but were also likely to exacerbate isolation and loneliness (Mental Health Foundation, 2020). We knew it was more important than ever for patients to engage creatively and connect with others, so we founded the Digital Art School; artist-led workshops live-streamed weekly via Zoom, directly from artists’ studios or homes. The Digital Art School Pilot Project was conceived to create a safe virtual space for service users to engage with art, inspire curiosity, and spark creativity, sharing the arts with those who don’t typically have access to it.
In 2024, we will elevate the Digital Art School in several ways. This includes producing 9 new live workshops and 27 on-demand tutorials delivered every month as well as 25 instructional videos for Digital Art School facilitators over the 3-year programme overlaid with BSL led by extraordinary artists of diverse backgrounds and practices; conducting a comprehensive evaluation of the project; venturing into Social Prescribing; upskilling our team in digital marketing, and developing a strategic plan directly informed by feedback from mental health service users and staff. In addition to this we are providing boxes of high-quality arts materials to almost 600 NHS mental health inpatient units in England for each year of the programme.
Throughout 2022, we conducted an extensive evaluation of the Digital Art School Covid-19 Pilot Project, with a view to understanding, measuring, articulating, and improving our programme offer. We employed a distinct combination of quantitative and qualitative evaluative methods to suit our desired outcomes. This ranged from analysis of Zoom registration data since the project’s founding in 2020 to help us track our growing audience and evidence impact, to semi-structured interviews with occupational therapists to better understand the evolving needs and circumstances of mental health service users and staff. As well as providing access to creativity and expression to mental health service users, our considered evaluation methodology presents a unique and unprecedented opportunity to gain an understanding of the needs, preferences and challenges of this audience, who have a diagnosis of a Severe Mental Illness, and who have been historically under-considered and neglected by the arts sector. Our ambitious project now aims to gather quantitative and qualitative data from 223,900 engagements with mental health service users across 598 NHS units in England over the next 3 years.