Essex partners with charity bringing smiles to seriously ill children

University of Essex academics will team up with a charity specialising in entertaining seriously ill children as it bids to expand its services to more specialist hospitals around the country.

Spread a Smile will be tapping into the expertise of the School of Health and Social Care’s Dr ZhiMin Xiao and Dr Nestor Asiamah through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) aimed at creating a research-backed evaluation framework.

This framework will be used to demonstrate the importance of Spread a Smile’s work in children’s hospitals, with a previous impact report in 2024 suggesting 93 per cent of children visited by charity staff felt happier afterwards.

The KTP will help Spread a Smile to build staff capability, support research activity, and enable evidence-based decision-making to optimise services and strengthen future planning.

Dr Xiao said: “Children and young people have always been at the heart of my research.

“This project will allow us to study them in clinical settings and specialist hospitals across the country. We can see and feel the impact of the services that Spread a Smile are delivering to the wards for so many seriously ill children in the most difficult of times.

“We are absolutely thrilled to be able to work for a great cause, with a great charity.”

Spread a Smile, which currently visits around 10 per cent of seriously unwell children, is aiming to expand its services to all 23 specialist children’s hospitals in the country.

The project team will be creating a framework that is able to account for a number of complex metrics, such as ages, conditions, prognoses and hospital stays of the children and young people supported by Spread a Smile.

It will consider key areas including the optimum number of visits per child, how much it improves a child’s stay in a hospital or hospice, and the difference it makes to family members.

The support provided by Dr Xiao and Dr Asiamah will offer Spread a Smile independent, academic validation that will significantly enhance its ability to demonstrate the impact of the charity’s work to funders and partners.

Lucy Jackson, Spread a Smile Chief Executive said, “This is an extremely important piece of work for Spread a Smile which will enable us to clearly understand and showcase the amazing impact and power of our work across the NHS hospitals we partner with and for the families with seriously ill children that we support.

"As a charity, we are committed to ensuring that our entertainers deliver the best and most appropriate service possible.

“This research project will help us do just that, ensuring we can reach families when they need us most, inspiring the public to support our work and helping us to deliver our strategic goal of delivering regular entertainment provision in all 26 specialist children’s hospitals across the UK by 2035.

“We are very much looking forward to working closely with Dr Xiao, Dr Asiamah and the team and our sincere thanks go to Innovate UK for generously funding the project and helping us to take this next step in our long-term plans for growth.”

The project is being funded as part of Innovate UK’s KTP programme, which connects university academics with businesses to find innovative solutions to real-world problems.

The University of Essex has the largest portfolio of KTPs among UK universities, with 58 active KTPs.