Creative Health Research Round-Up 2025 - Report Now Live
The Creative Health Research Round-Up 2025 event on Wednesday 28th January 2026 brings together researchers, practitioners, and organisations to showcase and reflect on creative health research published during 2025. Led by the National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) in partnership with the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH), this first annual round-up highlights the breadth, quality, and real-world relevance of creative health evidence across the UK.
The open call invited submissions including peer-reviewed articles, reports, evaluations, and grey literature with a UK-based application. All submissions were required to be publicly accessible (or accompanied by accessible summaries) and to include a short lay summary explaining their relevance for practice.
You can now watch a recording of the event here.
Executive Summary:
The Executive Summary provides a concise overview of key themes, insights, and implications emerging from the 2025 submissions. It is designed to support practitioners, policymakers, commissioners, and system leaders to engage with the evidence and understand how creative health approaches are being applied across healthcare, community, and public health settings.
Creative Health Research Round-Up 2025 Report:
The Creative Health Research Round-Up 2025 report brings together a wide and diverse body of creative health research, practice-based evaluation, and cross-system strategy outputs published during 2025. It is designed both as a record of activity in the field and as a practical navigational tool, supporting practitioners, researchers, policymakers, commissioners, and system leaders to understand what is currently being explored, how knowledge is being generated, and where future effort may be most usefully directed.
The report is informed by an open call for submissions led by the National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) in partnership with the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH), specifically through its Arts, Health and Wellbeing Special Interest Group. The call ran from September to November 2025 and combined open dissemination with targeted outreach to creative health research centres and sector partners, helping to surface work from across disciplines, sectors, and organisational scales. Eligible submissions included peer-reviewed research, transferable practice evaluations, and a wide range of grey literature, such as policy briefings, economic analyses, toolkits, strategies, and mapping outputs, all with a clear UK-based application.
All submissions meeting the eligibility criteria were included, reflecting NCCH’s commitment to valuing academic research and industry insight equally. This approach recognises that different parts of the creative health ecosystem generate different forms of knowledge, speak to different audiences, and operate under varying resource conditions, yet together shape the field. Editorial decisions focused on accessibility and transparency: where necessary, summaries were adapted into plain English, and strengths and limitations were made explicit to support methodological literacy and informed decision-making.
To support navigation, submissions are grouped under emergent themes developed during the review process. These themes reflect the material received rather than pre-set categories, and include areas such as equity and cultural relevance, mental health and wellbeing, strategy and systems development, co-production and participatory practice, creative methodologies, and toolkits and frameworks. The report also highlights notable gaps, including limited attention to physical health outcomes, population-level public health priorities, and workforce development, pointing to important opportunities for future research and collaboration.
Taken together, the report provides a comprehensive and transparent snapshot of the creative health landscape in 2025. It is intended to be a practical resource that can inform policy, commissioning, research design, and delivery, while supporting ongoing learning, reflection, and sector development.
Research Projects Featured at the Event:
The event showcased seven research projects selected from a strong national response to the open call:
Crafting Lyrics, Breaking Barriers: A qualitative study exploring how rap music supports mental health expression among Black men in the UK, highlighting culturally relevant approaches to reducing stigma and fostering connection.
The Body Hotel Self-Care Suite: An evaluation of a movement- and body-based programme supporting NHS staff wellbeing in Wales, particularly those working in palliative care.
ReCITE: A community-led innovation programme addressing health inequalities across the Liverpool City Region through hyper-local, partnership-based interventions.
SHAPER-PND: A randomised controlled trial evaluating a community singing intervention for mothers experiencing postnatal depression, demonstrating strong clinical, social, and cost-effectiveness outcomes.
(not) lovely: Enacting solidarity in dementia care through participatory arts - Ethnographic research showing how participatory arts can transform emotional experiences for people living with dementia and challenge dominant care models.
Using Oral Histories: A Methodology for Public Health Advocacy: Research demonstrating how heritage objects and oral histories can be reimagined as tools for health literacy and public health advocacy.
