At the National Galleries of Scotland we want to make art work for everyone. We know that art can distract, entertain, provoke reactions, stimulate our senses, help us to process our thoughts and emotions… art can help.

We’ve teamed up with Edinburgh Children’s Hospital Charity to see how art can help at the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People.

Over the last four years we have:

• Provided art trolleys packed full of fun ideas and high-quality materials
• Given the parents and carers of children at the hospital a coffee, on us
• Created Art Helps packs – based on the ‘5 ways for wellbeing’ - for areas of the hospital that couldn’t be accessed by Play Teams during the pandemic
• Cycled the Art in the Open bike to the outdoor spaces for summer workshops
• Organised monthly Artist-led Creative Clinic sessions in the outpatient’s unit

The latest programme, inspired by the Art Helps packs, is a monthly wellbeing session for staff at the hospital. These sessions provide an opportunity, through the process of making art, to slow down, take notice, tickle our creative brains, explore something different and temporarily take us out of our ‘workplace heads’.

These ‘Wellbeing Wednesday’ sessions are artist-led, no-pressure, forty-minute lunchtime Zooms. We Zoom into their hospital hub. We’ve found that even though Zooms aren’t in person they still have the power to turn someone’s day around.

For us to work with children, young people and staff in a hospital is a privilege. The Creative Clinics and interventions have done all sorts of brilliant things that we didn’t necessarily know they would do when we started. They've eased growing tension felt by children and families when waiting times have been long. Often the people we work with are actually the siblings of the children because this frees up the nursing staff and parents to focus on the sick child knowing that the sibling is okay and is being catered for.

At times we’ve even helped the clinical process – there was a child who wouldn’t let the doctor see their eye keeping it closed but as they became absorbed in the art activity their eye opened allowing the doctor to see. We have countless stories like this one. We also find doctors will use what the child’s made as an ice breaker at the start of the appointment and it can help create a positive mood.

And this is the benefit of working in partnership, we hadn’t created this pack specifically for that area of the hospital – or with babies in mind - but because we’ve developed resources with the people in the hospital, who are plugged into an existing system, there’s a real understanding of what they are and what they can do, and they can be directed to wherever they are needed.

Hopefully we’ve given some insight into our evolving work in this area and perhaps given some clarity and confidence in how visual art can help to support good health and wellbeing – not just the participants who we have initially in mind – but with their siblings, parents/carers, clinical staff – and ourselves as workers in the gallery.