Some of life’s hardest moments are spent in hospital, but two organisations are working to ease that with ingenious designs. Mina Holland explains how art has been a lifeline
I gasped when I first set foot on Snow Fox. An actual, audible gasp. I didn’t know hospitals could look and feel like this. But even then, at my most hopeless, I couldn’t help but feel buoyed up by the surroundings. Everywhere there were tones, shapes, materials, pictures and words to steal the attention, little hooks for the minds and senses of children and adults alike.
It was a hot, rainy weekday in June 2019 and we had come to Snow Fox, a ward for regular paediatric outpatients at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, with our three-month-old daughter, who needed a blood transfusion. Though she was, as yet, undiagnosed, we were beginning to realise there was something gravely wrong. She’d been admitted to our local hospital three weeks earlier with a haemoglobin level that was termed “incompatible with life” and been transfused over a number of days. There, the ward’s bare walls bore peeling paint and our bed overlooked the hospital’s bins. The bleakness of our circumstances was mirrored by the environment.
