Art at the Start: Creative community intervention for perinatal and infant mental health

The 'Art at the Start' project has been offering arts therapy and creative play sessions to promote the health and wellbeing of parents and 0-3 year old infants within Dundee Contemporary Arts gallery. During our project, we have managed to reach families who don't traditionally visit art galleries and have helped parents who have had difficulties bonding with their children to connect to together with them through shared art making. We have evidenced positive changes in the quality of family wellbeing via questionnaires, interviews and observations of family interactions which focus on the experience of the infant. Our project has been listed as an example of best public health practise and won several public engagement prizes. The proposed research scales up this successful approach, embedding four art therapists within four arts galleries across Scotland to explore whether the 'Art at the Start' model can be successfully repeated in different settings, widening access to arts spaces and supporting parents and infants across Scotland to build secure relationships.

The NHS rely on community spaces to help them provide the first line of support for families with young children who are struggling with their wellbeing, but don't yet qualify for urgent clinical care. However, a special task force put together by the government to support parents and infants' mental health recognises that 'community' interventions need to be more sustainably resourced. In order to gain funding, services like ours need a strong evidence base. By bringing together researchers from psychology, arts and arts education, we hope to explore how we can both quantify and qualify the impact of our service; explaining how effective it is, how and where it works, and why. We will do this by gathering information on how people feel before and after engaging with our service, and by exploring which groups of people tend to visit the galleries before and after our out-reach programme. This is important, because access to arts is known to have a protective impact on health and wellbeing, but many marginalised groups in our community struggle to access cultural spaces. Although we have planned how to measure our outcomes, our research programme will also adapt as we go, taking into account the perspectives of gallery staff, local communities and NHS teams gathered in regular 'stakeholder' meetings. At the centre of this 'action research' approach is our art therapy team, who have been trained to reflexively adapt the service they provide depending on their clients' needs and local conditions. This will help us to learn how our service can be adapted to different cultural settings.

Our ultimate aim is to showcase to the Scottish Government how we can use the power of the arts to provide a cost-effective solution for public health and wellbeing. Giving children the best start in life is important, because our parents teach us how to interact with others, and the love they provide is essential for us to develop academic and social competence. Poor starts in life can be passed down through generations, and the 'Art at the Start' model offers a way to break this cycle. Since both early relationships and access to the arts have been shown to have protective benefits for health and wellbeing, our intervention stands to have a long-term impact on the lives of the families we reach. To ensure that this powerful impact is heard by those who design and fund parent and infant mental health services, and by the cultural spaces which might host such interventions, we have planned a number of key outputs, including academic papers, a professional magazine article aimed at the gallery sector, and a policy paper summarising the project's outcomes to be presented in person and in writing to gallery, government and NHS teams. This will help us to show how arts and science perspectives can be brought together to present creative solutions to public health problems.