Recent projects with the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust:
- MA Fine Art student Helen Acklam has worked with the Histology and Dialysis Units at the Royal Sussex County Hospital on a two-year project. Her research, entitled Remains, explores the idea of loss and the concept of the personal and collective memories of patients, staff and visitors to the hospital using video, audio, painting and sculpture. See Helen Acklam news item.
- BA(Hons) Photography student Bronwen Rowlands is working with ward staff to document the Royal Sussex site through photographic work before it is demolished to make way for a new high-spec hospital building
- BA(Hons) Design and Craft graduate Hanna Mawbey has tested her precious metal inhalers with the Respiratory Unit at the Royal Sussex County Hospital.
- The Centre for Research in Twenty-first Century Writings worked with the Trust on their sustainability communication presentation considering innovative ways to write and present ground-breaking work. The Centre helped shape a Trust policy document which has potential impact for a variety of users and audiences from patients to commissioning groups.'
Our partnership is helping to achieve the aims of the BSUH Public Art Strategy, namely to:
- Create a healing environment that is welcoming, therapeutic and restful
- Create environments that respond to the specific needs of patients
- Provide distraction, pleasure and stimulus to staff and visitors
- Help create a strong and welcoming identity for the Hospital, and reflect the culture and identity of the local community
- Create excellent working environments for staff
- Contribute towards creating a landmark building for the area which engenders a sense of civic pride
- Help make it easy for people to find their way around the building
- Support the Trust’s aims to create a sustainable building
- Create close working partnerships with the local arts community
Our partnership seeks to:
- Work together to make the best of the new 3Ts capital redevelopment of the Royal Sussex County Hospital in 2014-2024 (http://www.bsuh.nhs.uk/about-us/hospital-redevelopment/), spanning teaching, research and public engagement in architecture, the role of design in healthcare, community arts, archiving the disappearing nineteenth-century site, local history and much more
- Embed joint activity in both partners’ teaching, research and public engagement activities
- Match the University of Brighton's arts students with ongoing or new hospital activities, giving them the chance to work with BSUH NHS Trust on their independent student projects.
Onward Arts
Onward Arts is the NHS Trust’s Advisory Board for arts activities across the Trusts’ sites in Sussex. The College of Arts and Humanities sits on this Board and helps to develop events, projects and on-ward artworks with a range of other external partners. For more information see http://www.bsuh.nhs.uk/about-us/hospital-redevelopment/onwards-arts/.
About the BSUH NHS Trust:
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals (BSUH) is an acute teaching hospital working across two sites in Brighton and Haywards Heath. Treating over three quarters of a million patients each year, it provides District General Hospital services to local populations in and around the City of Brighton and Hove, Mid Sussex and the western part of East Sussex and more specialised and tertiary services for patients across Sussex and the south east of England as well as working in close partnership with local GPs.
Its specialised and tertiary services include neurosciences, arterial vascular surgery, neonatal, paediatrics, cardiac, cancer, renal, infectious diseases and HIV medicine. It is also the major trauma centre for Sussex and the South East. It seeks to provide and improve healthcare in ways which best meet the needs of those patients and their families, and provides an academic centre for research and innovation and teaching of medical and healthcare practitioners.