Arts, health & wellbeing: reflections on a national seminar series and building a UK research network.

An account is provided of a UK national seminar series on Arts, Health and Wellbeing funded by the Economic and Social Research Council during 2012-13. Four seminars were organised addressing current issues and challenges facing the field. Details of the programme and its outputs are available online. A central concern of the seminar programme was to provide a foundation for creating a UK national network for researchers in the field to help promote evidence-based policy and practice. With funding from Lankelly Chase Foundation, and the support of the Royal Society for Public Health, a Special interest Group for Arts, Health and Wellbeing was launched in 2015.

Evaluating the impact of participatory art projects for people with mental health needs.

Participatory art projects for people with mental health needs typically claim outcomes such as improvements in confidence, self-esteem, social participation and mental health. However, such claims have rarely been subjected to robust outcome research. This paper reports outcomes from a survey of 44 female and 18 male new art project participants attending 22 art projects in England, carried out as part of a national evaluation. Outcomes were quantified through self-completed questionnaires on first entry to the project, during January to March of 2006, and 6 months later. The questionnaires included three measures: empowerment, mental health [Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (CORE)] and social inclusion. Paired t-tests were used to compare overall change, and mixed model repeated measures analysis of variance to compare subgroups, including age, gender, educational level, mental health and level of participation. Results showed significant improvements in empowerment (P = 0.01), mental health (P = 0.03) and social inclusion (P = 0.01). Participants with higher CORE scores, no new stress in their lives and positive impressions of the impact of arts on their life benefited most over all three measures. Positive impressions of the impact of arts were significantly associated with improvement on all three measures, but the largest effect was for empowerment (P = 0.002) rather than mental health or social inclusion. This study suggests that arts participation positively benefits people with mental health difficulties. Arts participation increased levels of empowerment and had potential to impact on mental health and social inclusion.

Mental health and arts participation: the state of the art in England.

Although participation in arts activity is believed to have important mental health and social benefits for people with mental health needs, the evidence base is currently weak. This article reports the first phase of a study intended to support the development of stronger evidence. Objectives for the first phase were to map current participatory arts activity, to identify appropriate indicators and to develop measures for use in the second phase of the research. A survey of participatory arts projects for people with mental health needs aged 16 to 65 in England, identified via the Internet and relevant organizations, was carried out to map the scale and scope of activity and to establish the nature of current approaches to evaluation. The results indicate that the scope of activity, in terms of projects' settings, referral sources, art forms and participation is impressively wide. In terms of scale, however, projects reported low funding and staffing levels that may have implications for the feasibility of routine evaluation in this field. Current approaches to evaluation were limited, but entailed considerable effort and ingenuity, suggesting that projects are keen to demonstrate their benefits. The survey has enabled us to build on the best evaluation practice identified to develop a measure for assessing the mental health, social inclusion and empowerment outcomes of arts participation for people with mental health needs. For the second phase of the study we will work with arts and mental health projects, using the measure alongside qualitative work in a realistic evaluation design, in order to identify the characteristics of effective projects.