Welcome
Hello and thank you for visiting Arts for Health at Manchester Metropolitan University. I hope that these pages give you some idea of our vision, aspirations and current activity.
Arts for Health has been at the leading edge of this agenda for over 20 years and following the retirement of its founding director, Peter Senior in 2007 we’ve been developing and expanding our portfolio of work; chiefly around the areas of research, enterprise and significantly over 2008, teaching and training.
Over the last 3 years we have undertaken a research and development project with funding from HM Treasury. The Invest to Save: Arts in Health (ISP) project has come to an end now, but we’ll be sharing some of our research findings over the coming year as part of work that’s developed from the ISP. The university has developed a 3-year strategic partnership with the Department of Health, Public Health Group, North West and Arts Council England, North West and over the next year we’ll be exploring regional responses to the arts and health agenda, building on our learning from the ISP and responding to the national strategic documents; A Prospectus for Arts and Health and The Arts, Health and Wellbeing. We’ll be holding a series of events across the region to take this work forward, details of which will be posted on this site.
I do hope these web-pages are helpful. Like any website, it’s only useful if we get input from people who visit it, so please let us have your ideas and get in touch about anything.
Clive Parkinson
Current News
St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospital Arts
Vision - To embed creativity, culture and the arts within the heart of the St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals, supporting the delivery of health services across innovative, beautiful buildings that are fit for purpose, are user friendly, promote well-being and raise aspirations.
For the last 18 months Arts for Health at MMU have been working alongside St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals and Taylor Woodrow Construction to develop an integrated arts programme into two new hospital builds. The work began with creating an arts strategy for the Trust and led on to a programme of commissioning artists for a selection of locations around the new St Helens Hospital. Artists for the first phase of installations have been selected and all work should be ready and installed by the time the hospital opens on October 17th 2008.
Click on the links below to view a profile of each of the selected artists along with some details on their work at St Helens.
- Chris Wood
- Andrew Tanser
- Benjamin Storch
- Claire Weetman
- Stephanie Carlton Smith
- Carl Jaycock
- Deon Winter
- Matthew Lindop
- Nick Turvey
- Joanna Kessel
- Inge Panneels
- Edwina fitzPatrick
Voluntary Arts Network
Arts for Health have now teamed up with Voluntary Arts Network to ensure that the voluntary arts are recognised as key players in promoting wellbeing. Further information on this new partnership can be found here (PDF).
Alan Johnson Speech
Following on from the House of Lords debate in March this year and at the invitation of its instigator Lord Howarth of Newport; Clive Parkinson, Guy Eades, Anna Scott-Marshall, Sunand Prasad, Ken Bartlett and Nigel Osborne attended a meeting with the Secretary of State for Health, Rt Hon Alan Johnson MP on the 9th July, to discuss the Department of Health's support for the arts and health agenda. Amongst the agreed outcomes of the meeting was the commitment of the Secretary of State to make a public speech, supporting the arts and health agenda. true to his word, Alan Johnson made a speech on the 16th September 08 at The Wallace Collection. The speech is available here to read (PDF). We'd be very interested getting feedback from you on this. Email any comments to artsforhealth@mmu.ac.uk
5th Annual North West Public Health Conference 13th-14th October 2008
Creativity, Culture, the Arts and Health feature predominantly at the 5th annual North West Public Health conference 13th/14th October 2008, Liverpool. Conference details (PDF).
House of Lords Debate on Arts and Healthcare – 6th March 2008
Arts for Health at Manchester Metropolitan University featured prominantly in a debate around the role of the arts on health, at the House of Lords. Both Earl Howe and Lord Howarth spoke passionately about the agenda. Download a transcript of the debate (PDF).
Current News
If you click HERE, you’ll be able to open a PDF of the consultation report; Towards Transformation which we launched at the Critical Friends event at the Lowry on September 19th 2007. Chaired by Dr Nick Baylis, co-director of the Well-Being Institute at the University of Cambridge, the event sought to share the draft findings of our research, inform our final summary report and further understanding of evaluation in relation to arts and health practice. Please be aware that this report was purely for consultation purposes and is full of idiosyncrasies, is 90 pages long and has been superseded by our summary report, so don’t print it out if you don’t need to.
You can visit the Invest to Save: Arts in Health project archive web-pages by clicking here.
Our Summary Report, Invest to Save: Arts in Health Evaluation, Exploring the impact of creativity, culture and the arts, on health and well being, is available here.
We will be uploading 6 individual project reports which give full details of the process's and outcomes of the research undertaken. You can currently download a summary of the combined quantitative research findings and each projects quantitative analysis here.
The short film by Clemens Kogler, which explains succinctly what the research has been about in relation to the 6 projects that we’ve worked with, is available here.
We are now preparing to take this work to a range of conferences and seminars, as well as taking part in a range of media opportunities as we prepare the completed research for publication. This website will hold all research materials, data and feedback and an executive summary will be produced as hard copy in November 2007. For more information on the evaluation of the day is available here.
The response of writer David Gaffney and artist David Bailey to our research project is available here (PDF).
The film-maker Hafsah Naib was commissioned to work with the 6-projects involved in our research. Her film, Document, which was shown at the Critical Friends event, is available to watch by clicking HERE.
A BBC interview with BlueSCI and Arts for Health, broadcast on September 20th on the BBC Radio Manchester is available as a sound file by clicking here.
