Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity intends to harness the power of art with its new Inspiring Spaces Appeal, which needs to raise £170,000 to transform the clinical environment of its young mental health patients, helping to improve wellbeing and aid recovery.

The hospital’s in-patient mental health facility, Parkview Clinic, located in Kings Heath, cares for young people aged 11-18 years old who are experiencing significant mental health illnesses, including severe anxiety, self-harm, psychosis and eating disorders.

Patients can stay anywhere from between a couple of months to over a year, so the clinic quickly becomes a home away from home for them.

Studies have shown a patient’s environment has a direct impact on their experience, recovery and health outcomes, with inspiring artwork helping to improve levels of stress and anxiety, enabling them to participate more fully in their care. Currently, the areas within Parkview reflect a typical hospital environment, exposing patients to uninspiring, stark, sterile, white walls.

The Inspiring Spaces Appeal will change this. The charity is partnering with Hospital Rooms, an arts and mental health charity, which collaborates with artists, service users and NHS mental healthcare specialists, like Parkview, to craft innovative artwork and creative programmes, to transform health spaces into places of hope, dignity and recovery.

Twelve well-known artists have been commissioned to work with the patients at Parkview to develop art installations which will be displayed across the clinic – from wards to communal spaces – giving the young people the opportunity to express themselves and engage meaningfully with contemporary art as part of their care and recovery.

The artists who have been commissioned to support the transformation of Parkview are at varying stages of their career, from emerging artists to those who are world-renowned, and come from Birmingham, across the UK and even globally.

They include Exodus Crooks, a British-Jamaican multidisciplinary artist and educator based in the Midlands, who is interested in self-determination and how it is steered by religion and spirituality; Rhys Coren, a London-based artist working across animation, writing, performance, painted marquetry and furniture; plus Charley Peters, an artist whose work examines how digital culture shapes contemporary perception and has been exhibited internationally, with recent shows in the US, China and Poland.

The artists will soon start a series of workshops with the patients at Parkview to develop the art installations, ensuring the environment reflects their tastes and feelings, while staying true to the artist’s style.

For further information about the Inspiring Spaces Appeal or if you would like to donate or fundraise for the campaign, visit Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity’s website: bch.org.uk/inspiring-spaces-appeal