Damian Hebron hopes that community arts outlive the current focus on targets and instant results.
According to plenty of media outlets, the nation is currently sitting on an obesity timebomb which sounds pretty uncomfortable. At the same time we are fed a daily diet of articles about the impact of hoodies on our nations youth, of drugs on our inner cities, of immigration on our schools. And, despite the hyperbole employed by the media, many of these concerns have their basis in the fact that society is diverging. While society as a whole appears to be getting richer, living longer and achieving better grades at school, a significant number of people are finding themselves further and further behind that trend. The majority of this group of people live in large cities and the division between this small but significant portion of the population and the rest of society is something that affects us all.
The division is felt nowhere so keenly as in health. Richer people live longer. And richer peoples babies are less likely to die than those born into poverty. According to the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, men in Dorset live 12 years longer than men in Glasgow. The Audit Commission has reported that there are twice as many GPs per head of population in Oxfordshire as there are in Gateshead. The Government and the Department of Health have made a concerted effort to tackle health inequalities over recent years yet, despite this, according to the Department of Healths own Public Service Agreement target, the gap is widening.
And so, increasingly, health providers are turning to different and innovative ways of challenging this gap. And, in the eyes of health providers, few things are more different and, perhaps, as innovative as the arts. The field of arts in health began in an effort to tackle the forbidding environment of Britains hospitals, but increasingly the arts are being seen as a tool in tackling other aspects of the nations health agenda. Just as arts activities have been employed successfully in schools and prisons, so community arts projects have been established in a range of locations around the country to tackle some of the problems thrown up by health inequality. In London, perhaps the foremost example of this is the Bromley by Bow Centre, which has pioneered the use of an integrated approach to the arts in community healthcare settings. Located as it is in one of the poorest parts of London, the Bromley by Bow Centre serves a population where infant mortality is 50% higher than the national average and with a higher than average incidence of heart disease, respiratory problems and suicide. The Centre developed out of a project where artists ran workshops in exchange for free workshop space, and it now employs over 100 staff and runs a full range of health clinics as well as a wide selection of arts activities.
Projects like that at Bromley by Bow are now being replicated around the country incorporating the same principles of community engagement and an emphasis on accessibility and a wide range of artforms. What the Bromley by Bow project has achieved is mainly as a result of its integrated approach and an attitude to health which is not overly focused on the treatment of physical illness. Self confidence, physical fitness and an effort to improve the local environment are seen as being of equal importance to prescriptions, pills and painkillers.
Bromley by Bow will no doubt be used as a benchmark of good practice as Arts Council England unveils its approach to the cultural aspect of the Well London programme. This is a new £9.5m pan-London programme that will invest in community-led arts projects over the next three years to promote health and mental well-being. Well London has the potential to do for arts in health practice what Creative Partnerships has done for arts activity in schools, revolutionising attitudes and making the arts an absolutely essential part of good community health provision.
The arts have the potential to act as a catalyst in building strong communities and improving the health of society as a whole. Arts projects offer communities the opportunity to express themselves and can help foster community understanding, local pride and a sense of belonging. However, arts projects will rarely have an instant impact. Media attention on these issues (not to mention the tabloids love of stories about wasting money on art), create a pressure for instant results. This is not to mention the Governments obsession with targets in health outcomes. Getting to those hard to reach sections of society takes a lot of time and effort. Otherwise they would not be hard to reach. Decision-makers in the National Health Service, in local authorities and beyond need to acknowledge the slow burn nature of this work. Hopefully, recent efforts to roll out more community arts activity will receive the support they deserve from senior management in primary care trusts up and down the country. If the support for community arts is simply a response to tabloid hyperbole, then that obesity timebomb will keep ticking and might just explode which is not something any of us will relish.
Damian Hebron is the Co-ordinator of London Arts in Health Forum and Arts Co-ordinator at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge.
e: damian@lahf.org.uk
w: http://www.lahf.org.uk
The London Arts in Health Forum is looking at the issues involved in developing community arts in health activity over the course of this autumn with a series of events for more information visit http://www.lahf.org.uk