Notice boards in hospitals usually display health-related circulars for staff or informative posters for patients. But the boards at the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital (RGGGH) are now filled with “thank you” messages from children.
To express gratitude for the work of healthcare providers during the pandemic, the artwork of many children were pooled in and handed over to the RGGGH.
“Thank you for being there for us. You are a superhero,” read a card on display, while another one said, “Thank you so much for risking your lives for us. It is the most kindest thing anybody has done.”
Spreading smiles
The works brought smiles on the faces of doctors, nurses and staff of RGGGH.
“We got more than 200 cards from the volunteer-children. There were drawings, paintings and letters, all thanking us for our work during the pandemic. Looking at the contribution from the children definitely made our day. I wanted all our staff to take a look at the messages, and so displayed the cards on boards outside the COVID-19 block, my office and at the Madras Medical College campus,” E. Theranirajan, Dean of RGGGH, said.
In fact, in one of the drawings, a child had portrayed a healthcare staff as “Captain America” fighting coronavirus, he pointed out.
This is part of “Project Joy”, an initiative that has been training children to create gratitude cards for healthcare workers, said Vedika Agarwal, who has been carrying out the project.
By school students
“We are doing this project in the city by involving students registered from various schools. We train all of them in an art module to create gratitude cards and are sharing them with the healthcare workers in various hospitals,” Ms. Agarwal said.
So far, the initiative has trained 250 children, and shared the cards with a number of government and private hospitals, Ms. Agarwal said.
