Client: Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital (BWC) NHS Foundation Trust — Centre for Paediatric Spiritual Care (CPSC) / Paediatric Chaplaincy Network (PCN) Settings covered: Paediatric and maternity clinical care settings
Project Overview
This project was commissioned directly by Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital’s Centre for Paediatric Spiritual Care, working with the Paediatric Chaplaincy Network, to produce a body of 360° photography documenting the physical spaces, artefacts, and practices of multi-faith spiritual care across paediatric and maternity clinical settings. The brief centred on the hospital’s chaplaincy team — a genuinely multi-faith group covering six world religions, working across day care, long-stay paediatric wards, maternity, and end-of-life/bereavement contexts — and how the material culture of faith and pastoral practice shows up inside a modern acute clinical environment.
Rather than photographing chaplaincy in the abstract, the brief was to capture it in situ: the objects chaplains actually carry, place, and use; the spaces set aside or adapted for prayer, ritual, and quiet; and the way different traditions’ practices intersect with clinical routine, from a day-case ward to a bereavement suite.
Scope of Content
The 360° photography spans the settings and moments where spiritual care intersects with clinical care at BWC:
- Day care and short-stay settings — the more everyday, lower-intensity end of chaplaincy presence: ward visiting, quiet spaces, comfort items
- Long-stay paediatric wards — spaces and artefacts supporting ongoing pastoral presence for children with extended or repeat admissions
- Maternity settings — spiritual and religious practice around birth, including support for loss and bereavement in a maternity context
- End-of-life and bereavement care — the most sensitive material in the set: the objects, rituals, and adapted spaces used across different faith traditions when a child is dying or has died, and the pastoral practices supporting families and staff through that
Across these settings, the photography includes artefacts specific to different faith traditions — items used in prayer, blessing, ritual washing, memory-making, and mourning — captured within their real clinical context rather than staged separately, so the images show how a multi-faith room, a bedside, or a bereavement suite is actually used, adapted, and shared across traditions.
Multi-Faith Grounding
The project draws directly on BWC’s existing, real chaplaincy infrastructure: a team spanning six world religions (Christian denominations, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and others reachable on request), and a body of research-based practice developed by the Centre for Paediatric Spiritual Care under Revd Dr Paul Nash and Revd Dr Sally Nash. This gives the photography a genuinely evidenced foundation rather than a generic or illustrative one: what’s shown reflects documented, practised multi-faith chaplaincy.
Interactive Content
Alongside the 360° imagery, the project incorporates interactive content layered onto the panoramic material — allowing a viewer to move through a space and encounter contextual detail (what an object is, which tradition it belongs to, how and when it’s used) without that detail cluttering the image itself. This mirrors the wider design principle running through the project: the photography carries the emotional and spatial reality of the setting, while interactivity carries the explanatory layer, so neither has to compromise the other.