Welcome to health.culture.info – Creativity, Culture, the Arts and Health. Scroll down past the news feature to view useful links and resources – these are summarised in the column to the right – covering both practical needs as well as current & recent research in the area.

NEWS AND COMMENTS

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Contact

Send an email to the Arts for Health team who are managing this Culture.Info portal – you can click here to do this.  The current contact details are as follows:

Clive Parkinson
Arts for Health
Manchester Metropolitan University
Righton Building
Cavendish Street
Manchester
M15 6BG

T +44 (0) 161 247 1091
E This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

W www.artsforhealth.org

What's It All About?

Creativity, Culture and the Arts can play a significant part in promoting health and well-being, developing and enabling communication, addressing behaviour, challenging attitudes and stimulating debate.

Manchester Metropolitan University’s Arts for Health is very pleased to present this portal which we hope will be a resource which adds to the sharing of knowledge and improved understanding of the relationships between the arts and health.  In the UK examples of practice that impact on public health and that contribute to the evidence base are emerging through both explicit practice and high quality experience.  The Arts for Health project has been delivering broad ranging work in this field for over 30 years and we hope that this web-portal will provide opportunities for further links to be developed amongst organisations across the world who are contributing to this growing agenda.

When we talk about arts and health, we’re referring to creative, cultural and artistic partnerships that take place between those in the creative sector and those working in health and social care; specifically developments where this activity intends to enhance public health and well-being. The creative act and the primacy of the art-form offer unique opportunities for those in the health sector.

Increasingly health strategists and practitioners are turning to the arts to humanise their work, delivering against national regional and local targets. The UK government is beginning to see the benefits of creative approaches to shared priorities and a number of high-profile arts and health projects have secured funding from government departments other than the DCMS and Department of Health.

Self esteem, improved environments, staff recruitment and retention, and engagement with local communities through innovative ways of working, are just a few ways that the arts can impact on the health agenda.

Practitioners across the UK can learn much from global initiatives ranging from the work of War Child in the Sudan to the invaluable work around the arts and mental health in Australia.

Whilst arts and health practice can have distinctly therapeutic benefits, much of its emphasis is within communities and not focused on individuals. The arts therapies (art, music, drama, dance and movement) combine the arts with psychotherapy and represent a significant allied health profession, with a specific role in both assessment and treatment. Significantly the arts and health agenda tends not to focus on illness, but public health and well-being. These pages are about sharing knowledge and developing our understanding of what the arts and health agenda is about and crucially, what it will grow to be about. So we encourage conversation, inspiration and shared ideas through the comments feature at the end of this page.

Arts for Health manage this Culture.Info web-portal and can be contacted by clicking here .

You can now access one of the other main pages within this subportal:

• Key organisations (International and UK)
• Research and Evaluation