Creating Change

Creating change: A collaborative action inquiry approach for integrating creativity and community assets into Integrated Care Partnership responses to health disparities

Led by the University of Huddersfield, this Phase 2 Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities funded project took a collaborative action inquiry approach, working with stakeholder organisations and people with lived experience to explore how to evolve creative health approaches across West Yorkshire. Whilst the region is leading the way in developing non-clinical approaches to promote health and wellbeing, creative and community providers are not yet fully integrated into the health and care system.

Aims and Approach

The project asks ‘What would it mean to redesign local health systems with stakeholders in response to health disparities in ways that integrate and realise the value of community assets?’ and aims to bring about the systems change needed to integrate community-based creative assets into local commissioning and delivery systems.

Working collaboratively with stakeholders from health trusts, local authorities, creative/cultural practitioners, community providers and people with lived experience, inquiries were carried out in the five ‘places’ that make up West Yorkshire - Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield to understand the social drivers and complexities of health problems in communities, as well as learning from the challenges and achievements of partners in practice, to envision new possibilities for change. This was followed by further workshops which developed priorities for action going forward. The process was underpinned by a partner mapping exercise and rapid reviews of creative health approaches and models of partnership development.

Learning

Through the action leaning approach, important insights were gleaned into topics such as;

• the complex drivers of health inequalities in communities in West Yorkshire
• how creative, cultural and community assets can be best harnessed in response to these inequalities
• the challenges in accessing creative and community assets and achieving sustainable creative provision
• how people with lived experience and community members can help develop creativity and support in communities to improve health and wellbeing

The project explored what a creative health infrastructure for West Yorkshire should look like and developed a programme theory of how community-based creative health provision can be systematised, along with a logic model for a creative health infrastructure and how it incorporates cross-sector ecologies of practice and links with the Integrated Care Board. It produced evidence with which to challenge existing cultures of public health provision dominated by the medical model and inform culture change across health and social care provision centring on the role of the community sector.

Project outputs include:

Project Report - https://research.hud.ac.uk/media/assets/document/hhs/Creative-Health-in-Communities-Print-Final.pdf

Policy Brief - https://research.hud.ac.uk/media/assets/document/hhs/Developing-Creative-Health-Provision.pdf

Research Briefing – Perspectives of People with Lived Experience - https://research.hud.ac.uk/media/assets/document/hhs/TheValueofCreativeHealth.pdf

This project has played a key role in catalysing regional creative health developments to develop an Integrated Care System-wide consortium in West Yorkshire of local authorities, health system partners, community assets, artists, people with lived experience, creativity and health specialists and local universities.

Next Steps

Creative health continues to advance in West Yorkshire. In January 2025, the University of Huddersfield launched the Creative Health Hub - a pioneering research and creative co-production hub with a vision of advancing and embedding creative health provision across the region. To coincide with the launch, the Hub published the ‘Cultures of Creative Health’ book, which includes case studies, interviews, position pieces and exhibitions from across the region of West Yorkshire pointing to the potential impacts of creative health across the region when the conditions allow communities and practitioners to thrive.

Find out more here: https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/ceada/creative-health-hub/