Arts, Culture and Public Health: Passion, Scepticism and Critique

There is much in the field of Arts, Culture and Public Health to be passionate about.  The public health challenges we face nationally and internationally are immense and social and health inequalities are growing.  We need to draw on all possible resources to strengthen our collective efforts to protect and promote individual and population health. Community assets provided by heritage, culture and the arts are potentially powerful resources to help achieve our goals.  Considerable strides have been made in arts, culture and health practice and research over the last two decades.  We should celebrate the advances made and the growing commitment internationally to the concept of social prescribing to improve health and wellbeing among those most in need of support. We need to be realistic, however, about the value of cultural engagement and the planned use of arts programmes for health and wellbeing. Can culture and the arts make a substantial contribution or is their role relatively minor?  Can provision of opportunities for cultural and creative participation be scaled up and delivered equitably to begin to address social and health inequalities?  In this presentation, I argue that our enthusiasm of the value of culture and the arts for health and wellbeing needs to be tempered by scepticism and informed by robust critique of existing research studies and evidence reviews.