JOURNAL OF CHILD HEALTH CARE 13(3) 306 306 A simple act? BERNIE CARTER Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Child Health Care Professor of Children’s Nursing, School of Nursing and Caring Sciences, University of Central Lancashire, UK Recently I sent a request to a local primary school asking if the children would like to draw or paint a picture or write a poem that reflected a child’s experience of being in hospital or an experience of being sick and getting better. Apart from wanting to make links with children in the local community the main outcome of this request was for us to be able to select the ‘best’ five pictures from those submitted. These five pictures would be awarded a prize and would eventually adorn the walls of the corridors of the Children’s Nursing Research Unit at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. This seemingly simple and fairly innocuous act set up a number of ethical and moral resonances and needed thinking through before I sent the request to the school. More resonances were set up whilst I and my colleagues were judging the children’s entries; resonances that were not just to do with the children from the local school who had taken part but also resonances about children from developing countries. Simple acts require us to think of the consequences and implications of our actions. In our, I would still argue, reasonable desire to engage with the children in a local school and generate art work for the walls, we discussed and thought through a number of different questions. Some were considered more deeply than others but all of them led us to question our request. We questioned whether we were exploiting the children’s creativity and/or intellectual property, we questioned why we wanted young children’s art work on the walls and what sort of message this was portray- ing about us, our values and our sense of what was important in terms of the public image of our research unit. Were we exploiting the children? In the UK and in most developed countries, children create art work as part and parcel of their everyday activities at school. Much of this work is taken home to be shared with family and friends with the family home becoming an ‘art gallery’ displaying a range of the child’s oeuvre. By and large, chil- dren are generally extremely pleased to have their art work displayed at school or for it to receive particular attention. Clearly the children who took part in our very small scale competition were eager and keen to get involved and they produced a lot of really lovely images and ideas for us. We offered small prizes for the winners as this seemed to be a reasonably fair way of showing the children that we felt that their contributions were important. But as we were viewing the entries it was clear that we RESEARCH JCHC Journal of Child Health Care © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/ jounalsPermissions.nav Vol 13(4) 306–307 DOI: 10.1177/1367493509346190 Keywords child ● drawing ● ethics ● painting by guest on October 29, 2016 chc.sagepub.com Downloaded from