Organisations of Hope: Building a Creative Consortium for Health Equity in Greater Manchester

On average, residents in Greater Manchester have worse health outcomes than people living in other parts of the country. This is true for both physical and mental health. However, what is particularly striking is how these poor health outcomes vary across the city region, affecting some communities and areas more than others. Arts and creative activities can cross community and cultural boundaries and have a positive impact on people's health and mental wellbeing. Therefore, we see creative health activities as a possible way of addressing these inequalities. Unfortunately, the organisations and assets that support creative health across the city are not well linked up with the health and social care systems, so are currently difficult for people to access and benefit from.

Greater Manchester has pioneered a new approach to addressing inequalities by combining health and social care in a way that allows the two to work together closely to support those accessing these services. The city has also played an important role in building evidence for how access to creativity, culture and heritage can enhance health and wellbeing. Due to this, Greater Manchester has committed to becoming a creative health city region and has devised a strategy for achieving this goal with a focus on increasing equity. Once this strategy is fully implemented, we will see creative activities and opportunities being accessed by multiple community groups, creating a supportive environment where people suffering from long-term physical and mental conditions can benefit. However, to achieve this we first need to understand the existing links between those who provide creative health activities, health practitioners, policymakers and local communities and then how to improve and embed these connections.

Researchers at the University of Manchester (UoM) and King's College London (KCL) will work with the Greater Manchester Integrated Care System - the new body that links up health and social care across the city region - and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority to build a creative health consortium. This will be a diverse group of organisations and individuals that represent communities, cultural organisations, charities and local government. The group will work together to understand how we can use existing 'community assets' to improve health and wellbeing and increase equity. We want to know what assets people use, what the barriers are to using them but also where the gaps are and what people would like more of in their neighbourhoods. We hope to understand better how such resources might make our communities healthier and fairer.

During the project we will explore barriers to integrating creative health approaches into the city-wide system for care. This will involve mapping local activities, assets and resources as well as looking at how they are spread across the whole city region. We will focus on activities that influence health and wellbeing, looking for ways that very successful activities might be shared or replicated to serve other communities. We think that people working in cultural and community organisations as well as people in health and social care need better information about creative health. They may also need new kinds of training. We plan to find out more about these needs and how they might be met. We hope in the future that the consortium will be able to develop future research into the relationships between creativity, community assets and health equity. This will involve testing different approaches and understanding better what works and why. We want to be in a position to do the right research with the right people so we know how to make creative health activities more fairly available across cities and regions.