As the new Labour Government meets for its party conference in Liverpool this week, we have distilled evidence from our last decade of research into arts and health to inform how we collectively move forward.
25 September 2024
As the Labour Government meets for its party conference in Liverpool this week, it faces the enormous task of identifying priorities and policies for the coming years. Newly elected MPs and ministers must respond to significant challenges across health, from increasing demand and growing waiting lists, to workforce issues and inequalities within the population.
It can be easy, in the midst of so many competing priorities, to overlook things that seem like luxuries in society, like our engagement with the arts. We see such deprioritisation time and time again in rapid cuts to cultural budgets when we hit periods of austerity. But now, on the brink of change, let’s not make that mistake again. Simple, creative activities in our lives can have marked effects on mental and physical health and psychological and social wellbeing. They are actually important health behaviours that have a role to play in lots of the major challenges facing society, from our youth mental health crisis to preventative health agendas.
Based on our last decade of research at UCL, here are five things we’ve learned about how the arts can help deliver Labour’s “plan for change”.
1. The arts can tackle complex health problems
For the past seven years we’ve been collaborating with the World Health Organization (WHO) to identify health challenges the arts can help solve. And the evidence base is large. Our WHO evidence review identified over 3,500 studies showing how the arts help in preventing physical and mental health conditions as well as managing and treating illness.
Case study:
Take postnatal depression – we’ve worked with partners to complete nearly 10 years of studies, showing that community singing programmes lead to faster recovery from symptoms than usual NHS care. After just six weeks of singing, mums in our trial had experienced a decrease of nearly 35% in their symptoms and 65% no longer had moderate-severe symptoms. This work is regularly citied as an example of best practice evaluation in the arts and health field and the programme has now been commissioned in NHS settings and across Europe. The findings from our follow-on trial SHAPER will be out shortly.
What’s more, our research has shown that arts engagement can also have a preventative effect. As just one example, by tracking tens of thousands of randomly sampled individuals we can see that adults over the age of 50 who go to galleries, museums, live music events or the theatre once a month have a 48% lower risk of developing depression over the following decade.
2. Arts can also help us confront long waiting lists
In the context of huge hospital backlogs the arts can support people on waiting lists, who otherwise all too often experience a further decline in their health. Right now, we’re working with 10 NHS sites across England to investigate exactly this, through our study Wellbeing While Waiting. Using social prescribing we are connecting hundreds of young people waiting for mental health services to non-medical community support, including creative activities. Our research shows that these arts activities actually contain many of the same active ingredients as therapies, through which they can promote health and wellbeing. This presents a valuable opportunity to support patients and simultaneously relieve pressure on our health services.
3. Investing in arts has major health economic benefits
The case for the Treasury to invest in the arts is strong. Research we published in Nature Medicine last year pooled data from 100,000 people across 16 countries to show that countries with higher levels of arts and creative hobby engagement have higher happiness levels and life expectancies. However, the benefits of such investments also ripple much further – for instance by reducing pressure on social care and enabling more people to stay in employment. This impact can be monetised. In fact, collaborating with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Frontier Economics, we’ve been working on a new report highlighting the costs and benefits of arts investment that will be published very shortly.
4. But to achieve all this we need to support equitable engagement
Access to the arts is currently woefully unequal. Our research shows social patterns, for example that people living in the 10% most affluent areas are 21% more likely to engage in the arts than those living in areas of medium deprivation. The danger is that if they aren’t tackled, these disparities in access mean that people who may need the health benefits of the arts the most could be denied them. In our latest research we’ve explored barriers to arts and cultural engagement in depth, shining a light on how individuals can engage in the arts if they are given appropriate support and resources and showing how we can take a multi-system approach to making the arts more accessible. Watch our animation below to find out more.
5. And a great place to start is with young people
In her maiden speech as Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy spoke about putting creativity back at the heart of a “richer, larger life for every single child”. Introducing children to arts has immediate health benefits and fosters lifelong engagement which pays off in leaps and bounds. Although there is a challenging “social gradient” in access to arts engagement in children’s home environments, our research shows true equity in access can be achieved if children are given arts opportunities in schools. After setting up healthy habits in childhood, we can then continue to offer arts activities via communities, workplaces and health and social care settings so that people have consistent and accessible provision throughout their lives.
The health benefits of the arts is not a niche field. Our WHO evidence report has now been downloaded over 200,000 times, making it the fourth most downloaded WHO publication ever. It has sparked new policies on arts and health from over a dozen countries; part of a major international pattern of growth in arts-health policies. And in the UK there is already significant momentum behind social prescribing, which was included in the 2019 NHS Long Term plan as an approach to connect people to non-medical support such as arts activities in their communities.
With this established evidence base and impactful work already taking place across the country, now is the time for Government to take bold action and invest in the arts, to the benefit of all our health.
This blog was written by Rachel Marshall (Communications and Impact Manager) and Daisy Fancourt (Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology, Head of Social Biobehavioural Research Group, and member of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport College of Experts).
