Greater Manchester – Towards a Creative Health City Region

Building on a long history of arts and health work, Greater Manchester (GM) has set forward its ambition to become the world’s first Creative Health City Region. In 2022, GM launched its Creative Health Strategy taking a population health approach and outlining how culture and creativity can help to address health inequalities in the city region by building on recommendations developed with the Institute of Health Equity as part of the Build Back Fairer in Greater Manchester Framework.

The strategy aligns creative health with the priorities of the Combined Authority’s Greater Manchester Strategy and with NHS Greater Manchester Integrated Care’s Joint Forward Plan, positioning creative health as a key part of GM’s mission to become a greener, fairer and more prosperous city region where everyone can live a good life; grow up, get on and grow old.

Leadership is one of six key pillars of the strategy, which recommends a strategic lead for creative health at combined authority level to connect the creative health ecosystem, with further development of cross-sectoral leadership across local government, health, VCSE, cultural and community sectors.

To facilitate the alignment and delivery of health and local government strategies, staff often work across both organisations and in close partnership with locality colleagues and this is true of the GM Creative Health lead, meaning that creative health can be integrated into locality, public service reform and health strategy and delivery.

In Greater Manchester Integrated Care Partnership, creative health is a key pillar of Live Well, a whole system approach to improving personal and community wellbeing, resilience, and social connection. It has also been integrated into clinical areas such as young people’s mental health and dementia care and has demonstrated good results.

“As the first city region to publish its own Creative Health Strategy, Greater Manchester Combined Authority is leading the way in realising the potential of creative health to improve the health and wellbeing of our residents.

Creative Health is part of Greater Manchester’s wider commitment to addressing health inequities through community led health and wellbeing and as part of that approach, we will be working to develop a sustainable creative health infrastructure including training and support for practitioners and support for communities to develop and explore their own creative health practice.

In Greater Manchester we are proud of our cultural richness and creativity and we know that this is core to us becoming a healthier city region”. - Paul Dennet, Salford City Mayor, Deputy Mayor for Greater Manchester and portfolio holder for Healthy Lives and Homelessness.

The Creative Health Strategy is now incorporated into the GM Joint Forward Plan for 2023-2028, which sets out how health and care will be delivered across the region. It states:

“In November 2022, the Integrated Care Partnership launched the Creative Health Strategy, setting out a commitment to creative health as a core tool for addressing health inequalities and for improving access to and, in some cases, the effectiveness of specific clinical pathways. We will:

• Develop a distributed leadership network across GM to support the health and social care workforce to best employ creative health interventions and approaches.

• Promote the systematic and sustained use of creative health approaches by ensuring that clinicians, commissioners and other colleagues have access to information about creative health methodologies and practice and evidence of what works

• Support practitioners to develop and implement rigorous outcome measures and methodologies for creative health and work with HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) to generate new research on impact and outcomes.

• Deliver creative health interventions across the life course, from gestation to a good death, contributing to the delivery of Live Well.

• Develop referral pathways and opportunities to access creative health interventions and activities, especially within early years settings, secondary schools, within social prescribing and in dementia care.”

Alongside this strategic implementation of creative health, the Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities funded research programme ‘Organisations of Hope’, led by the University of Manchester, brings together multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral stakeholders into a creative health coalition. The research is mapping existing creative health assets across GM and working to understand how these might be better used to improve health and wellbeing and increase equity.

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