Princess Eugenie visits Springfield Hospital with arts and mental health charity Hospital Rooms
Her Royal Highness Princess Eugenie visited Springfield Hospital last week to tour the Trust’s new art installations and visit staff and patients.
Hosted together with arts and mental health charity Hospital Rooms, the visit included a tour of the new Trinity Building with service users and staff involved in the Trust’s art programme.
Creative spaces for healing
During Springfield’s £150m transformation between 2021 and 2023, Hospital Rooms led a series of 120 art workshops with patients, carers and staff, which inspired incredible conversations, collaborations and artwork proposals.
From this, leading artists co-designed 20 vibrant and uplifting artworks that have helped to shape a new creative landscape for mental healthcare in South West London.
The tour provided an opportunity for Princess Eugenie, who works as a director at Hauser & Wirth, one of Hospital Rooms’ charitable partners, to learn more about the programme and its wider impacts in transforming mental health settings.
From large scale vinyl installations and detailed painted murals to sound and moving-image based pieces, the installations have been designed to help reimagine the role of creativity in mental health environments.
Commenting on the visit, the Trust’s Better Communities Director, Ian Garlington, said, “It was a pleasure to welcome Princess Eugenie to Springfield Hospital to share more about our groundbreaking art programme and to introduce her to some of our amazing staff and patients.”
“Working with Hospital Rooms has been a fantastic experience for our service users, carers, staff and has been instrumental in creating warm and welcoming environments across our hospital.”
Visiting the Recovery College and our specialist services
The tour also included a visit to the Trust’s specialist Deaf services on Bluebell Ward, which provides mental health support to adults who are Deaf, Blind and sight- or hearing-impaired.
Princess Eugenie met a number of staff and patients, who explained more about the specially adapted braille art installations throughout the ward and also presented her with their own artworks.
Prior to this, the tour group stopped in at the Trust's Recovery College, a unique service providing a range of courses that empower those in recovery to become experts in their own self-care.
Princess Eugenie again took the opportunity to meet staff and learn more about the service's work and their co-produced art installation.
