CHILDREN with colourful imaginations have provided the inspiration for wall murals at a new area in the refurbished Felixstowe General Hospital.

CHILDREN with colourful imaginations have provided the inspiration for wall murals at a new area in the refurbished Felixstowe General Hospital.

The hospital - set to re-open in January after £1.76million of work - will feature a children's minor injuries unit.

Evening Star readers, businesses and campaigners helped to raise £18,000 for the children's unit three years ago in a Christmas appeal.

Work is now in full swing on the project and the final touch will be murals to make the area welcoming and interesting.

Florence Nightingale, back in 1854, wrote of the importance of art in hospitals - saying “variety of form and brilliancy of colour” in objects aided recovery.

Artist Louise Greenwood, who has studios in Felix Road, Felixstowe, has been working with children from Fairfield Infants and Trimley St Martin Primary schools on the initial designs, while A level students at Deben High School will add their ideas and paint the murals.

She said: The young children have provided some bold and bright and colourful images, many of them with rainbows, and I have used these as my starting point for the designs.

“I have the idea of rainbow ribbons twisting and curling along the corridor to the waiting room area, which would then have a beach and sea theme with beach huts and shore, and then in the consultancy room it could be a jungle with bright animals, a nice warm environment.”

Junior sister Rachael Osborne said: “It will be the children's area and we wanted them to be involved right from the beginning.”

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