this is you if: you have a mid-senior level role within a health or care organisation (a health board, NHS trust, health charity, local authority or other). Your role likely encompasses planning, resourcing and commissioning health/care services.
Key Overall Recomendation
➔ initiate conversations with arts practitioners: tell them what your biggest strategic priorities are (e.g. mental health, waiting lists, staff wellbeing) and what outcomes and evidence you are aiming for.
Groundwork
➔ enable and suggest opportunities for staff and service managers to work with artists to explore how creativity can help improve the service you provide to patients and communities.
➔ establish and sponsor workforce development projects that use the arts and creativity to understand staff experiences, and support their wellbeing at work.
Test
➔ proactively connect arts and health innovation teams with the right people and teams in your organisations to support the testing and development of ideas.
➔ create and nurture a culture within your organisation where new, even experimental, approaches and ideas are valued, and where staff feel they can look outside what’s on their job descriptions.
Invest
➔ be clear about the evidence (outcomes, stories, methods) that would encourage you to refer people to arts projects - and/or support them from your commissioning budgets.
➔ connect arts practitioners and organisations to your organisation's data, innovation and implementation teams to support evaluations.
Scale
➔ encourage other leaders both within and outside your organisation to value the arts, creativity and innovation in their environments, and go beyond just championing this work: make it happen.