Organisations of Hope
Addressing health inequalities and inequities in Greater Manchester.
Key people: Dr Simon Parry, Dr Angela Whitecross, Julie McCarthy, Hebe Reilly, Dr Luke Munford, Dr Helen Hawley-Hague, Dr Claire Forbes, Dr Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt.
Project Partners: NHS Greater Manchester / Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Cartwheel Arts, 42nd Street, Dementia United, Action Together
Organisations of Hope has helped build a creative health research coalition to address this question:
How can creativity, culture, and heritage address health inequities in Greater Manchester?
About the project
Building a Creative Health Coalition
Greater Manchester is home to a wide range of arts and cultural organisations, charities, and health and care providers. These assets support the health and wellbeing of our diverse communities.
However, community assets are not necessarily located where they are most needed, nor are they always well resourced, and they can be difficult to find or access.
We have tried to understand better how creative health assets are spread across Greater Manchester. We have also explored different communities’ access to these assets. What stops people from accessing them? What helps assets become more accessible?
What are Creative Health Assets
Creative health assets might include a park, a dance club, a choir or a community centre. We have tried to understand where these assets are and what residents would appreciate more of in their neighbourhoods.
We have also examined how these assets improve people’s health and wellbeing and tackle the social determinants of health, with a particular focus on mental health and well-being.
We have also explored how creative assets work together in networks and integrate with health and care systems.
Where did this all begin?
Despite Greater Manchester’s strong people focus and forward thinking, residents in Greater Manchester have, on average, worse health outcomes than people living in other areas of the UK, both for physical and mental health. Most striking is how these poor health outcomes vary across the city region, impacting some areas and communities more than others.
To address these issues, Greater Manchester has committed to becoming the world’s first creative health city region and launched its creative health strategy in November 2022. The aim behind this is for creative and cultural activities to have a positive impact on people’s health and mental wellbeing and address health inequities.
Organisations of Hope has supported this aim by developing further understanding of Greater Manchester’s creative health assets.
Funding
Organisations of Hope was funded (2022-2023) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). In 2021, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) established the £26 million Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities investment, which has enabled AHRC to fund several research projects that examine how to scale-up small, local approaches to tackle health inequalities. Organisations of Hope is one of these research projects.
Professor Helen Chatterjee, AHRC’s Health Inequalities Programme Director, remarked on the necessity of these projects for creating a fairer and more equitable society, that they guarantee shared infrastructure and spaces serve the entire community and play their part in addressing inequality.
"It is exciting to consider how bringing together and rethinking the use of cultural assets in these regions might change health outcomes for their communities."
Professor Helen Chatterjee / AHRC’s Health Inequalities Programme Director
University of Manchester Research Institute provided further to support to continue the work (2023-2024).
It is exciting to consider how bringing together and rethinking the use of cultural assets in these regions might change health outcomes for their communities.
Professor Helen Chatterjee / AHRC’s Health Inequalities Programme Director
Organisations of Hope brought together an innovative and diverse range of quantitative and qualitative methods, drawing on the multidisciplinary expertise of the academic team, the expertise of key partners and lived experience in communities.
Greater Manchester has a long history of collaboration and co-production in this area, and so the project team worked closely with creative health organisations, communities and practitioners from across the city region.
They did this via a series of collaborative workshops with communities and convened conversations with practitioners and stakeholders.
The process examined individual assets as well as the enablers and barriers to the integration of creative health within broader health and care systems.
The project worked to build a creative health coalition from a diverse group of organisations and individuals that represent communities, cultural organisations, charities, and local government. The group set out to work together to understand how we can use existing ‘community assets’ to improve health and wellbeing and increase equity.
The project had a number of intertwined strands:
- GM creative health asset mapping
- Understanding creative health assets from different perspectives
- Identifying barriers and enablers to integrating creative health within health and care systems
- Understanding children’s and young people’s access to creative health
- Understanding older adults’ access to creative health
- Professional development and the creative health practitioner
- Funding for creative health
We worked closely with Cartwheel Arts to understand more about communities’ access to creative health activities in their local area. Findings from this research have been published in A Hopeful Day storybook.
Artists Stacey Coughlin and Doodlher (Victoria Whitaker) created visual minutes of some of the workshops we held with community groups. These visual minutes give an overview of key findings about creative health assets that people access and what barriers might restrict access.
We also wanted to understand the professional development, training, and support needs of Creative Health Practitioners across Greater Manchester (GM), and produced a short report which is informing future provision for the sector.
We are working on future publications from this research that reflect on the challenges of implementing a civic strategy and explore some of the distinctive approaches to creative health within Greater Manchester.
We are continuing to work closely with our partners at Greater Manchester Combined Authority, NHS Greater Manchester and other universities from across the region on an ambitious 3-year programme of work (2024-2027) supported by Arts Council England.
The Greater Manchester Creative Health Place Partnership will pioneer new ways of supporting residents to live as well as they can, by creating new, community-led approaches with culture and creativity at their heart.
Meet our Project Team and Partners:
Core team
- Dr Simon Parry, Principal Investigator, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, The University of Manchester
- Dr Helen Hawley-Hague, Division of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, The University of Manchester
- Dr Claire Forbes, School of Environment, Education and Development, The University of Manchester
- Dr Luke Munford, Division of Population Health, Health Services Research & Primary Care, The University of Manchester
- Dr Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, King’s College London
- Dr Angela Whitecross, Division of Medical Education, The University of Manchester
- Julie McCarthy, Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Greater Manchester Integrated Care
- Hebe Reilly, Cartwheel Arts
- Anne-Marie Nugnes, Creative Manchester
- Matt Hennessey, NHS Greater Manchester Integrated Care
Project Partners
Other partners/supporters
Creative Manchester
The University of Manchester is developing a range of activities to support research into Creativity, Health and Wellbeing through the Creative Manchester platform.
Live Well Make Art
Live Well Make Art is an informal network in Greater Manchester that promotes creative health. Members work primarily in the arts, heritage, health, care, voluntary and education sectors. They all believe that creative activities can improve people's health and wellbeing while also helping to reduce societal and health inequalities.
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