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Arts, health and wellbeing for a happier, healthier Wales

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Arts, health and wellbeing for a happier, healthier Wales

By Liz Clarke, Programme Manager Arts, Health and Wellbeing, Arts Council of Wales

The joy we feel from watching a brilliant film, from dancing, attending a concert or just listening to our favourite song is no coincidence. There is a growing body of international evidence that confirms the positive impact the arts and creativity can have on our physical and mental health and wellbeing.

Engaging with the arts can help you manage your own health more proactively and keep you physically and socially active.  It has also been linked with preventing ill health and supporting child development. It can also support the care for people experiencing mental illness, acute conditions and neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Here in Wales, for the past decade, the arts and health sectors have been successfully working together to harness the power of creativity. Aiming to improve lives and take the pressure off our busy health and care services.

It has been an extraordinary and exciting time to be involved in this work. Whether it’s singing for dementia, dancing to prevent falls or running art activities to support patients with mental ill-health. Professional artists and arts organisation around Wales can be found working in community and hospital settings to support local health priorities.

Partnership

At the heart of our success is the partnership between our arts and health sectors – partnerships of genuine co-production, collaboration and co-ownership.

In 2017, the Arts Council of Wales and the Welsh NHS Confederation signed a groundbreaking memorandum of understanding (MoU). This has been renewed several times and inspired international recognition.  It is recognised as a model of good practice by the Baring Foundation in Creatively Minded and the NHS and a global study on arts and health conducted by Lancet Public Health.

We co-fund arts and health coordinator positions in nearly every health board in Wales, as well as Velindre University NHS Trust. These coordinators have proved to be a successful and relatively low-cost way to help bridge the gap between artists or arts organisations and healthcare professionals.

The Arts Council of Wales’s Arts, Health and Wellbeing Lottery programme also supports partnerships. For example, between Wales’s arts organisations; health, social care and third sector; individual artists and practitioners; and local authorities. These deliver a range of initiatives and programmes that respond to health challenges.

How the arts are supporting our health and wellbeing

Among the brilliant examples of successful arts and health projects in Wales is Into the Woods. This is a nature-based creative programme run by Outside Lives in partnership with Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (UHB). It  has been helping reconnect people to themselves, nature and the community.

Dance to Move, a programme with Ballet Cymru and Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, uses dance to improve health outcomes for young people living with chronic arthritis and their families. The Forget-me-not Chorus runs singing sessions every week for people across Wales and beyond with all forms of dementia, as well as their families, friends and the professional staff who look after them.

Hywel Dda University Health Board has launched a cross-sector social prescribing model. Welsh National Opera’s programme Wellness with WNO was initially created for people living with Long COVID. It has proved so successful that it has expanded as a rehabilitation service for other health conditions. It’s Wales’s first national socially prescribed programme, developed with and offered by all seven Welsh health boards.

The arts for healthcare staff

And it’s not just patients who benefit from arts and health work in Wales. The arts can also enhance healthcare settings and improve staff and community wellbeing.

At Swansea Bay University Health Board (UHB), the award-winning Sharing HOPE project was funded by the Arts and Minds programme with support with The Baring Foundation. It  saw more than 1,500 NHS staff members who had experienced trauma or mental ill health use poetry and other art forms as part of their recovery process.

Meanwhile, Cultural Cwtsh, an online, bilingual, creative wellbeing resource that we developed to support healthcare workers in the wake of the pandemic has since been embedded in Public Health Wales’s Hapus programme, making them freely accessible to all.

Sharing learning

We are committed to shining a light on these programmes and their successes, to continue raising awareness of the health and wellbeing benefits of the arts. That’s why we encourage the sector to share good practice with their peers, facilitate learning and training, invest in evaluation, ongoing learning and research. Wales Arts Health and Wellbeing Network, which is free to join, supports this practice.

Policy support and strategic vision

All of this progress in Wales is bolstered by supportive legislation. The Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (2015) requires public bodies to work toward long-term wellbeing goals, including a healthier Wales and a vibrant cultural landscape. It provides a useful framework for cultural and health sectors to collaborate, ensuring arts initiatives align with broader societal goals.

Ministerial support has been beneficial in helping arts and health become a recognised priority within the NHS. A cross-party group, chaired by Heledd Fychan MS, is dedicated to raising awareness of arts and health work among Members of the Senedd and achieving support for this vital body of work.

You can find out more about what our arts and health work in Wales here.

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