The arts as intervention: improving child health

To launch Creativity and Wellbeing Week (12-18 June 2017), the London Arts in Health Forum (LAHF) and GOSH Arts brought together artists, curators, researchers and museum experts at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH). It examined the ways that integrating the arts into health and social care can give children the best start in life.

The event started with performances from poet, author and spoken word artist Hollie McNish and author Cathy Rentzenbrink who spoke of their own experiences of how the arts and creativity can be used to aid recovery and produce a healthy society.

The panel discussion then brought together key figures in arts and health including Susie Hall (Head of Arts at GOSH), Caro Howell (Director of The Foundling Museum), Dr Daisy Fancourt (New Generation Thinker at the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Research Fellow at the Centre for Performance Science) and socially engaged artist Davina Drummond to discuss the social determinants of health and how participation in and access to the arts can intervene in generational cycles of poor health and wellbeing.

To coincide with the event, GOSH Arts have opened a retrospective exhibition in the Institute of Child Health (ICH) Gallery. The exhibition brings together work from GOSH Arts’ three-year partnership with the Foundling Museum and touches on ideas around the future, hopes and wishes, humour and communication, the development of medicine and waiting. The exhibition will be open to GOSH and ICH staff until the end of this month.

Creativity and Wellbeing Week is an annual event, organised by LAHF which showcases the different ways that creativity supports the health and wellbeing of everyone in society. www.creativityandwellbeing.org.uk