One year on?

When Arts Council England’s (ACE) national framework for arts and health (Arts, Health and Wellbeing) was published last year, it was the culmination of years of work by arts practitioners and Arts Council staff. The arts in health sector has made huge progress over the past five to ten years, in hospitals, in the community and in terms of research. The document, published as it was in conjunction with a joint prospectus with the Department of Health (DoH), felt like a triumph for those of us working in the sector and a sign that the long years of having to continually make the case for the arts in healthcare were over.

So how do things stand a year on? There’s certainly a lot happening. Hospitals across the country are developing arts programmes: in the past four months alone, I have personally advised three Trusts from around the country on how to go about establishing an arts programme. In London last year, an estimated 250 artists were employed in acute hospitals, many of them in lengthy residencies, developing their practice and improving hospital environments. The current hospital building programme, coupled with the increasing implementation of ‘per cent for art’ schemes by local authorities is generating opportunities on a massive scale for artists and arts organisations.

Beyond hospitals, GP surgeries and community healthcare facilities are increasingly addressing the impact arts activity can have on patients. The Invest to Save projects undertaken in Manchester and on the Isle of Wight point clearly to the benefits arts activity can have on social engagement and health. Academics are increasingly interested in the impact the arts can have on health outcomes and are developing robust proofs of the value of arts in health.

However, this work is built on shaky foundations. For years, arts in health has struggled to earn the support of ACE and the DoH. The sector continues to run the gauntlet of ill-informed press comment and pockets of resistance within the NHS. Last year, the National Network for Arts in Health collapsed and, while regional organisations work to promote the sector and there are many great individual examples of good practice, there is no strategic overview, no national advocacy. Despite the publication of the Arts Council and the DoH’s Joint Prospectus on arts in health, there is no longer a national lead for arts in health at ACE, and the DoH remains a bureaucracy largely impenetrable to the arts in health sector. Arts in health appears to have been affected as much if not more than others by the reduction in the availability of Grants for the Arts funding, while support for arts in health activity from the NHS is piecemeal and not nationally consistent. There is a lot of grassroots enthusiasm for arts activity in healthcare settings – it just seems that everyone thinks that someone else should be paying for it.

While arts organisations working in a variety of artforms spend fortunes on audience development and activities to reach people traditionally excluded from the arts, arts in health practice takes the work to the audience, and generally for a lot less money. At a time when both ACE and the DCMS are experiencing “slippage” (see ‘DCMS criticised for missed targets’, AP171) in terms of Public Service Agreement measures of attendance and participation by priority groups, it seems crazy that arts activity which directly reaches out to these groups in community settings is not championed and supported.
The arts in health sector has become very skilled at securing funding from other sources than the Arts Council. High profile projects like the Evelina Children’s Hospital have put high quality art at the centre of a busy central London hospital without any support from ACE. Organisations from London and beyond have for years secured funding from diverse sources to support artistic activity in healthcare settings and will continue to do so.

What the sector needs is not a huge injection of cash (although I’m sure collectively we wouldn’t say no), it’s someone with clout standing up and shouting about the benefits of the arts: it’s the strategic leadership and advocacy that the framework and the prospectus promised a year ago. If, as the framework states, “Arts Council England, the Department of Health and many leading healthcare experts firmly believe that the arts have an important part to play in improving the health and wellbeing of people in many ways,” then it would be great to hear them all saying so.