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.

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; this ranged from data analysis 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. From 2024-27, Hospital Rooms Digital Art School, supported by a nationally significant Arts Council England project grant, funding from Pinterest and Art Explora, and £360,000 of in kind art materials from Winsor and Newton, will bring an accessible and appealing digital arts programme and art materials to every mental health inpatient ward in England.

As well as Digital Art School 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 into 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. We aim to gather quantitative and qualitative data from 223,900 engagements with mental health service-users across 598 NHS units in England over 3 years. Our Lived Experience Steering Group will support the interpretation of the data gathered, interrogating both successes and areas for iteration. Our programme aims to be sector-defining, culminating in a robust evidence base and report providing insights on the role of arts and creativity for people with a Severe Mental Illness.