Creative Health Review - End of Life & Bereavement
Creative approaches are commonly used in end of life care to improve wellbeing and quality of life, helping people to process and express emotion and maintain human connection. Creativity can also play an important role during bereavement and grief.
The National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing (APPG AHW) Creative Health Review Report notes:
Creative health supports people at the end of life, providing relief from symptoms and pain, improving quality of life, and providing psychological and spiritual support for the individual and their friends, family and carers. Creative health approaches are used as part of bereavement support and can help to normalise conversations around death, dying and bereavement.
With demand for end of life care increasing, a high level of unmet need, and inequalities in access, policies and frameworks are moving towards a more personalised, integrated and community-based approach. Creative health can be a valuable resource, improving the quality of service and relieving pressure on acute services.
Creative health is also an important component of a public health approach to end of life care and bereavement, fostering community-based and social support.
Further information about the Creative Health Review
The Creative Health Review highlights the potential for creative health to help tackle pressing issues in health and social care and more widely, including health inequalities The Review has gathered evidence that shows the benefits of creative health in relation to major current challenges, and examples of where this is already working in practice.
Central to the Review were a series of themed roundtables that were held between Autumn 2022 and Summer 2023. The Review has translated the findings from these Roundtable themes together with contributions into recommendations for policymakers to encourage and inform the development of a cross-governmental creative health strategy, which will support creative health to flourish and maximise its potential across key policy areas.
The Review commissioned a range of artists with their own lived experience to respond creatively to each of the Review's roundtable themes. Phillipa Anders responded to End of Life Care and Bereavement.
"Bereavement is a very lonely space – we need to support people better at this incredibly vulnerable time and creativity has a vitally important role to play in this".
