The tiny room can barely contain the noise as enthusiastic children bash enormous drums with joyful encouragement from Adesose, a master African drummer. This scene of musical mayhem is played out in the unlikely setting of a children's ward in the Royal London hospital.
For the next week the hospital hopes to transform itself into a vibrant arena of artistic activity for the annual multicultural week, organised by Vital Arts. A schedule of storytellers, exhibitions, dancers, performances and workshops will provide entertainment to patients, staff and visitors.
It is testimony to the growing importance placed on art's integration into the healthcare system.
"Britain's health service has truly begun to embrace at a national level the idea that better environments make for better treatments," said Moira Sinclair, director of Vital Arts.
That art has therapeutic qualities is not a new idea, but it is one being embraced on an unprecedented scale. A report published by the Department of Health in June 2001 recognised that "the arts can contribute very significantly to the 21st century's more holistic approach to healthcare provision" and patient-centred treatment.
Alan Milburn, the health secretary, said: "I believe that the arts can play a very, very important role in ensuring those messages about healthy lifestyles, about engagement between the service and the communities that they serve, can be enhanced."
Vital Arts is the arts project of Barts and the London NHS trust, which serves three major London hospitals, all of them hosting events this week. It was born of the enthusiasm of a group of NHS managers who used their spare time to organise arts projects. In 1996, they persuaded the hospital's trustees to fund a part-time post of arts director.
Now Vital Arts has six staff: a full-time director, four part-time project managers and an artist in residence. They have a broad remit, covering consultations with architects, commissioning artists to work with patients in specific fields, giving NHS staff relaxation and rewards, providing arenas in which local artists can exhibit and engaging the local community.
Similar initiatives across the country are underway, aiming to ensure the arts become intrinsically linked to treatment and recovery. The national network for the arts in health (NNAH) was established in October 2000, partly to offer advice on establishing such projects.
"Until the network was established, everyone working in the field was operating in a vacuum, like an island in the sea," said Lara Ellen Dose, the director. The NNAH now boasts over 500 members, a contacts database and a website offering information and a discussion forum.
Arts in health projects are largely reliant on donations from businesses, individuals and charitable trusts, rather than NHS funds, so the NNAH considers its funding directory to be an essential tool.
"None of the work we do in this field is depriving people of hospital beds or medical treatment," said Ms Dose. "An NHS trust is not going to purchase a sculpture before a kidney dialysis machine."
The Department of Health's current rebuilding and refurbishment programme has also provided opportunities for consultation with artists at initial planning stages.
"We were very fortunate, we had a brand new building to work with, like a blank canvas," said Susan Loppert, who has been director of the arts programme at the Chelsea and Westminster since shortly after the hospital opened in 1993.
The Chelsea and Westminster has the most comprehensive and ambitious arts programme of any hospital in Britain. It offers events as diverse as puppetry and opera on a daily basis, boasts an enviable collection of contemporary art and houses a renaissance masterpiece in the chapel.
The general public are also free to attend many of the recitals and exhibitions, meaning, as Ms Loppert says: "The hospital is more than just a place where people come when they are ill. They come because it is a pleasant place to be, it's uplifting - it doesn't smell of cabbage and carbolic."
Ms Loppert has initiated a research project at the hospital because there existed only anecdotal evidence to support the conviction that arts projects improve health and aid recovery. The King's Fund, which provided a grant of £70,000 to cover the cost of the research, expects the results late this year.
There could be wider benefits too. Barts and the London NHS trust is one of the largest employers in east London, with almost 6,000 staff, but the NHS struggles to recruit - particularly in London - as there is a perception of poor pay, long hours and dreary working conditions. Vital Arts, which now boasts over 200 members of its staff arts club, believe they could help recruitment and retention.
Vibrant projects such as multicultural week are raising the public profile of arts in health. It is a programme aiming to place arts at the heart of community health development and clinical practice, creating more comfortable environments to work in and help the healing process.
