In 2014, Create Gloucestershire, NHS Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group and Local Authority partners started to explore a more structured way to grow arts and health across the county.
Image: Joe Magee
We wanted to build on the pioneering work of Simon Opher, a GP in Dursley who with 6 arts partners set up Artlift to offer art as a prescription to people across the county. This was commissioned by the Clinical Commissioning Group and over time provided an important data set that described patient outcomes and cost savings to the NHS.
Our ambition was to spread this service further and also explore if other health conditions could be prevented or improved with an art prescription.
We were delighted to be selected as a pilot site for The Cultural Commissioning Programme that Arts Council and NCVO partnered on between 2013 to 2017. The aim of this programme was to support arts and cultural organisations to come together with public service commissioners.
It provided much needed re-thinking time in Gloucestershire and laid the foundations for a new set of relationships across arts and health partners. We set up an innovative grant programme in 2015 that gave “test and learn” capacity to 12 arts and health projects in Gloucestershire designed to generate positive health outcomes for people with long-term health conditions (eg adolescents with Type 1 diabetes).
If you are interested to know more about our projects or the wider UK programme please do read the full learning report (pdf, 2.2MB) or summary (pdf, 242KB)
Behind the scenes of these test and learn projects was a longer term change strategy taking root. The goal - to strengthen the capacity in the arts and cultural sector and to understand the nuts and bolts of co-production.
We quickly understood that procurement methods and commissioning models were important but without trusted relationships our capacity for co-production would be skin deep. You can read more here about CG’s learning in an evaluation we commissioned from Jocelyn Cunningham, from “Other Ways of Working”
Jumping forward to 2020 several arts organisations in the Create Gloucestershire network continued to be commissioned by the NHS Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group to provide a broad and much valued Arts on Prescription service delivered across several different clinical pathways. A consortia of arts partners co-ordinated by Artshape was formed (Gloucestershire Creative Health Consortium) and Lucy Sharp, CEO of Artshape wrote a blog about it here.
During the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, the development and design direction of the five Arts on Prescription (AoP) providers in Gloucestershire, who currently make up Gloucestershire Creative Health Consortium (GCHC), shifted to meet new ways of working and requirements. This paper explores some of the key aspects of how work was tailored, allowing for ongoing and greater access to the services provided, and explores outcomes over the lockdown periods from 23rd March 2020 to 19th July 2021.
Gloucestershire Creative Health Consortium have shared these important experiences in this paper: GCHC Providing Creative Health in Gloucestershire during Lockdown
In 2022, we were back in Cam & Dursley with a collection of local organisations who came together to launch The ‘Off We Go’ project. This was a series of peaceful and engaging free activities for people in Berkeley, Cam, Dursley, Sharpness, Wotton-under-Edge and surrounding village who were feeling more anxious, especially when faced with going out since the pandemic.
The project was a collaboration between arts centres, Create Local place based alliance Cam & Dursley Creatives and the NHS, led by GP Simon Opher.