The Art Cart delivers a variety of activites to the bedside including knitting, card making, sewing, drawing, crosswords, short stories and playing cards.

The Art Cart programme aims to prevent patients becoming bored by involving them in creative arts. Tension, loneliness and a feeling of isolation can be transformed as interesting art and activites to help people feel more positive.

The Art Cart is managed by the Trust and is taken to the Wards by volunteers. Over the last 18 months our three volunteers at Heartlands Hospital have given out over 5000 packs of arts and crafts activities.

We now have three volunteers at Solihull Hospital who began the Art Cart in July 2006.  To date they have given out approx 300 packs.

We also have four invaluable ladies who come to Heartlands Hospital each week to pack the simple arts and crafts activities.

Activities contained within the packs include:

• Drawing & colouring
• Knitting
• Embroidery & Cross Stitch
• Quiz Packs of Crosswords, Sudoku & Wordsearch
• Greetings card making
• Juggling balls
• Short stories
• Talking books

The carts go out three days per week on each site, taking arts and crafts to patients on the wards. We also have requests to the Arts Office by telephone from wards and individual patients.

We constantly receive lovely stories like the one recently where they lady (at Heartlands) had the Art Cart come round. One of the volunteers got her started as she hadn’t knitted for 25 years. She enjoyed knitting while in hospital and then took the pack home.  Since then she has knitted 70 baby cardigans. She rang to say she would like to donate some of these to the Baby Unit at Heartlands.

We hope to receive enough donations to expand this service to Good Hope Hospital.
 
To become a volunteer or to make a donation contact the Arts team on
0121 4240113.