What is Create Health?
Create Health is a strand of our work that focuses on growing arts and health opportunities for everyone, every day, in Gloucestershire. It widens our understanding of ‘living well’. We view arts, creativity and culture as a fundamental part of living well, supporting recovery and contributing towards a sense of wellbeing for individuals, communities, and places.
Create Health is anchored across a network of place based networks (Create Local) that ensure the offer is firmly rooted in the needs, aspirations and assets of people and communities.
Why is Create Glos involved?
We believe wholeheartedly that arts, culture and creativity are as essential to being happy and healthy as food and drink.
Our commitment to arts and health practice goes back to our earliest days. As part of our original 8 point manifesto in 2012 we described our ambition as:
“Arts and culture prescribed as commonly as medicine, providing a preventative and therapeutic solution for those with health and emotional challenges”.
What is arts and health sector?
Broadly speaking there are 5 distinct but complementary areas that come under the banner ‘arts and health’. In their different ways each area contributes to a wide and holistic model of health which defines health positively as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
They are:
Medical training and Medical Humanities
Arts Therapy
Arts in healthcare environments
Since 2012 Create Gloucestershire has focused on Arts on Prescription and Participatory Arts. We have supported a range of test and learn projects funded by charitable trusts, Arts Council England and the Gloucestershire NHS Clinical Commissioning Group with input from a range of artists, arts and cultural organisations, community partners, patients, and clinicians.
Why is co-production a design principle of Create Health Gloucestershire?
Create Health aims to uncover creative solutions to health issues that nobody can discover alone - an alchemy where some people unlearn assumptions and ingrained practices while others discover they know more than they had previously understood or had the confidence to express.
Co-production is the design principle that supports this ambition.
The Social Care Institute for Excellence describe the key features in co-production as:
define people who use services as assets with skills
break down the barriers between people who use services and professionals
build on people’s existing capabilities
include reciprocity (where people get something back for having done something for others) and mutuality (people working together to achieve their shared interests)
work with peer and personal support networks alongside professional networks
facilitate services by helping organisations to become agents for change rather than just being service providers.
We are on a learning journey to embrace the full strategic and operational potential of co-production and how it enables personalised and creative responses to health needs.
How do our Create Local community groups support co-production?
Co-production uncovers and draws on assets and resources that are often hidden, ignored or unvoiced in individuals and communities. Place based network meetings are hosted by Create Gloucesteshire to allow relationships to grow and foster across personal and professional support networks.
A skilled host or broker (we call this a Creative Catalyst) is the spark to draw these alliances together and then hold the space for co-production.
Creative place based alliances are currently active in Cam + Dursley, Matson & Robinswood in Gloucester. They discuss health alongside education, crime and safety, housing, community spaces and so encourage a preventative and holistic model of health and wellbeing to emerge.
These groups are meet regularly in community spaces and can also be accessed online so if you are interested in joining any please register here. https://www.creategloucestershire.co.uk/place-based-cultural-groups or contact: connect@creategloucestershire.co.uk for more info and future dates.
The impact of Covid 19 on Create Health
Covid 19 disrupted arts and health practice just as it has for every sector and community in the UK. It highlighted and exacerbated health inequalities which will be a priority for Create Health moving forwards. The Barnwood Trust drew research together to map need across Gloucestershire which you can read here. The National Lottery Communities Fund have done a similar piece of research at the national level, read here.
We were surprised and hugely encouraged by the upswell of creative energy we saw through Covid 19 as people coped with isolation, anxiety, boredom and needing to find things to do with themselves and their families. Creative activities such as baking, crafting, gardening all flourished.
We also noticed how quickly people have worked out at a street level how to care for each other and ensure people get what they need. This combination of creativity and community has huge potential that we aim to build up over the next few years as we expand our network of place based alliances through Create Local.
So what next for Create Health?
We are currently supporting a range of health based projects within our Create Local places, initially in Cam and Dursley and Matson, Robinswood and White City in Gloucester.
Through our Creative Catalysts on the ground, we can capture learning and insights to feed into future funding and growth in this area, so more people across Gloucestershire can have access to creative activities that can grow their sense of health, wellbeing and living well. You can read more about the projects we’re involved in, in our latest blog Create Health: how we're supporting living well