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Teapot Trust is delighted to announce that our poster ‘Transforming the Treatment Matrix: using art therapy to help children manage and cope with their illness’ has been chosen as a finalist for the VHS Get the Picture Conference poster competition.

https://vhscotland.org.uk/event/vhs-annual-conference-and-agm-2018/

The poster is inspired by the children that use our service and our art therapists. It uses fun infographics, photographs and descriptive text to tell delegates about our cross-sectoral approaches to provide early art therapy interventions to chronically ill children and to influence policy change in the provision of treatment in the healthcare system throughout the UK.

It explains our aim to provide sustainable art therapy treatment to as many chronically ill children as possible, as well as what we have learned from family and clinical feedback: children with life-limiting conditions manage and cope with their illness better when they receive art therapy in parallel with medical treatment.

Delegates will be able to see how this works, as they follow ‘Jamie’s Journey’: a section of our poster that uses infographics to present a qualitative case-study of a young boy, who successfully worked with his art therapist to manage his needle-phobia and overcome his anxiety over routine hospital appointments.

Our poster also will give delegates direct insight into how our innovative embedding of BAAT certified art therapists into clinical teams ensures a more joined-up approach to the care and support of chronically ill children.

Delegates also will be introduced to our new research programme:

• what we are doing to address the lack of evidence-based research on this topic
• current projects, and
• how we ultimately plan to use research results to transform ‘the health and care system from a hospital-centered and illness-based system to a person-centred and health-based system’.[1]

We look forward to seeing you all at the VHS Conference and invite you all to stop by and have a chat with our Art Therapy Project Coordinator, Kirsty Edwards. We would love to get your feedback on our services, as well as our cross-sectoral approaches to research and efforts to encourage the uptake of Teapot Trust’s research. After all, it’s all about doing everything we can to change the conversation as well as policy!

[1] All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing Inquiry. 2017. Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing (The Short Report) 4. All Party Parliamentary Group: UK.