GRASP

Gloucestershire Royal Hospital's Artist in School's Programme

Introduction

As well as involving staff and patients within the hospital, Leading the Way also enabled the wider community, particularly children, to learn more about their local hospital through GRASP (Gloucestershire Royal Hospital’s Artist in School’s Programme). GRASP has involved more than 250 children and 30 teachers from across Gloucestershire, and 20 hospital staff members.

GRASP enabled 5 primary school artist residencies to build links to five different hospital departments, with the following aims:

  • Giving children an opportunity to learn how a modern hospital works
  • Enabling staff to engage with local childrenoutside a treatment situation
  • Enabling artists to distil this dialogue into entertaining and educational permanent artworks for the hospital

As well as creating a series of much loved, small-scale artworks for the participating departments, GRASP has also proved that an imaginative partnership between the education and health sectors facilitated by the arts, can provide health education, build new skills, raise confidence and pride, and create opportunities to have a lot of fun in the process.

GRASP was funded through the Pied Piper Appeal and Gloucester Round Table.