Thank you Frank [Harding, Chair of Paintings In Hospitals].

I’m so pleased to be here to help celebrate the work of Paintings in Hospitals.

A stay in hospital is inevitably a stressful experience. In years gone by people would also have to deal with the cold austerity of an anonymous hospital ward! Hardly conducive to a speedy recovery.

For 50 years, Paintings in Hospitals has brought beauty and inspiration to a place more associated in people’s minds with illness and death.

Many of us turn to music, poetry or art during at times in our lives.

Some of the best art comes from the struggle to express our deepest thoughts and feelings. The American artist Georgia O’ Keefe, said: “I found I could say things with colours and shapes which I couldn’t say in any other way – things I had no words for.”

Of course, art is not an alternative to medicine. You can’t cure cancer with an exhibition of Caravaggio. But you can help people to feel an awful lot more comfortable and relaxed in their environment. And in that way, art can be a powerful compliment to modern medicine.

Hospitals that pay attention to their physical environment can achieve real improvements in the health of patients.

Patients on the new cardiac ward at Leeds General Infirmary were on average discharged three days earlier, needed significantly less medication and rated their care as better than those who were treated on the old, considerably less pleasant ward.

Patients on the trauma and orthopaedic wards of the Chelsea and Westminster hospital who were exposed to music and the visual arts were able to go home a day earlier and needed less pain relief than other patients.

Art makes a real difference clinically, emotionally and spiritually. I would like to thank Paintings In Hospitals for the excellent work they do and for the difference it makes to so many patients and staff in the NHS.