The Arts and Culture Programme at UHBW exists to improve the look and feel of hospital spaces, to partner with civic, cultural and academic organisations, and to provide creative wellbeing activities for staff and patients. For more information see Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @ArtsUHBW
Our 2021 conversation was with Dr Anna Farthing, Arts Programme Director for University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust
The Arts and Culture programme at UHBW was founded in 2018 and works across ten hospital sites with nearly 14,000 staff in Bristol and Weston-super-Mare. The team now comprises four full time posts, supplemented by student interns and freelance specialists, who develop projects in partnership with other hospital arts teams, as well as civic, cultural and academic organisations.
At UHBW, the Arts and Culture team and the Sustainability team are both managed within the department of Estates and Facilities. The teams’ strategies are aligned and staff collaborate on projects of mutual interest, including supporting the Green Champions Awards (recently including an award to an anaesthetist working on better use of gases), inviting staff to contribute to nature photography projects, mindfully repurposing resources in creative design schemes, and greening the outdoor realm as part of carbon reduction and biodiversity action plans.
UHBW are engaged in a massive district heating infrastructure project that involves much digging up of the estate, and are consulting designers and tree experts to explore opportunities to extend woodland and increase access to green spaces – including public art and sculpture – ensuring a principle of ‘build back better’. The Arts and Culture team also ‘recycled’ an entire garden from a London hospital and had it installed in an interior courtyard in Bristol, adding value in excess of £40,000, and providing a safe space for patients recovering their circadian rhythms after treatment in intensive care. The team have numerous other initiatives to link the interior and insular hospital spaces to the outside world including hosting a staff landscape photography project to gather images of nature that are installed in windowless wards and working spaces.
Collaborative projects to promote reuse and recycling of resources and materials have generated cost savings both in reduced procurement of new items, and in reducing the costs of waste disposal. Example projects include: using clean disposable waste as craft materials; repurposing IT equipment internally and externally, for example providing laptops for schools; procuring second hand furniture from office clearances (e.g. with CollectEco); working with timber recycling projects to create benches and planters. They have also established an internal repurposing scheme for surplus furniture to be shared across sites and departments.
Both teams also build sustainable external partnerships, for example with Arts and Sustainability teams at other NHS Trusts, as well as with the Green Social Prescribing network, Bristol City Centre Business Improvement District, Bristol University’s Estates teams, student green space volunteers, interns, volunteers from eco businesses (Elmtree Gardens, Biotechture) and community groups.
During the pandemic they set up numerous small-scale community activities – e.g.: collecting domestic textiles and delivering them to local groups to be made into scrub caps and laundry bags for staff. This reciprocal activity has developed very valuable social capital.
As a response to lockdown, and working with other hospital arts teams, UHBW and Culture Weston produced Boredom Buster, a 48 page creative arts activity newspaper for patients and other isolated people. The first edition was inspired by the idea of a seaside annual, the second edition features the health benefits of engagement with nature, biophilia and various cultural engagements with trees and forests – including heritage (The Royal Oak) and world cultures (Shinrin Yoku). The Boredom Busters have sold over 70,000 copies to over 50 different organisations. To order copies, email boredombuster@uhbw.nhs.uk