This award to Hearts & Minds will support the Clowndoctors, enabling visits to the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow to continue in 2025. The Clowndoctors, dressed in yellow coats and red noses, bring comfort, laughter, and friendship to children twice a week, helping relieve feelings of anxiety and boredom during their hospital stays.

A representative explained more about the impact of the Clowndoctors: “A visit from the Clowndoctors is about connection and using performing arts in healthcare to help children face adversity with resilience, creativity, and humour. Each visit is unique to the child and can help improve emotional well-being and may help reduce the time children spend in hospital.”

Always visiting in pairs, the Clowndoctors are therapeutic clowns that go to hospitals, hospices, and schools for children with complex needs. They are character clowns, meaning they are gentle, naïve, optimistic, honest and simple. They find hope in every situation and excitement in the smallest things. They are always ready to play and connect with everyone.

The Clowndoctors are all professional performers selected for their empathy, compassion, respect and playfulness as well as their clown abilities. They are trained in clowning techniques including improvisation, surprises, music, slapstick, celebrating mistakes, and rhythm. They are also trained how to clown in healthcare and school environments with children and young people who might be feeling ill, vulnerable or anxious, or have disabilities or life-limiting conditions.

Once our performers are finished all their training, they become a therapeutic clown. What this means is that their visit can have a therapeutic effect – the visit might make the child feel better, less anxious and more positive. Their visits encourage fun, smiles and laughter as well as encouraging communication, connection and social engagement to benefit mental health, emotional health and wellbeing. 

Hearts & Minds champion Scotland’s Play Charter. They use clowning to provide inclusive, participatory play that is accessible to everyone, regardless of age, disability, gender, ethnicity, poverty or other circumstances, whatever their abilities or disabilities or how they communicate. They also support children and young people’s right to play under Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. 

Would you like to help us make an impact and change the lives of people in Glasgow and the west of Scotland? Why not make a donation on our website?