About the National Centre for Creative Health
The National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) advances good practice and research, informs policy, and promotes collaboration, helping to foster the conditions for creative health to be integral to health and social care and wider systems.
Creative health is proven to contribute to prevention of ill health, promotion of healthy behaviours, management of long-term conditions, and treatment and recovery across the life course.
Creative health activities can include visual and performing arts, crafts, film, literature, cooking and creative activities in nature, such as gardening.
Creative health approaches may involve creative and innovative ways to approach health and care services, co-production, education and workforce development.
The background
The NCCH published a tender to produce a suite of practical information and resources that would help drive support for, and adoption of, creative health in health and care systems.
I submitted a tender for the work and was awarded the contract.
The brief
The project involved developing two different types of resource that could be used in direct marketing and PR activities by NCCH and its partner organisations.
Both types of resource were aimed at people in organisations who influence and commission the use of creative health. This included clinical directors, GPs, directors of public health and directors of adult/children’s social care.
The resources would provide an entry point for the organisation’s comprehensive Creative Health Toolkit.
The first type of resource was ‘creative health in practice’. These pieces needed to promote the proven benefits of creative health for in different health and care settings and for different health conditions. They needed to be 300-400 words so they were short and to the point – perfect for the busy audience.
The second type of resource was ‘implementing creative health’. These resources needed to help practitioners in different settings get started with creative health. These were longer pieces of between 500 and 700 words, but still short enough to not be overwhelming.
The process
I started by developing the template for each of the resources so we knew each piece would have the same format.
Creative health in action
For the creative health in practice resources, I suggested:
- an introductory statement summarising the benefits of creative health for the topic in question
- a series of short quantitative benefits
- a single case study that looked at the topic through a qualitative lens and brought creative health to life
- further resources of interest, notably the Creative Health Toolkit and the ‘implementing creative health’ piece where relevant
- ‘boilerplate’ text on the NCCH
Once the template had been agreed, I worked to complete a series of 14 resources. These were approved by the NCCH management team and fact checked by the NCCH’s Research and Policy Manager before being published.
Implementing creative health
The shape of the ‘implementing creative health’ resources was harder to pin down. The NCCH team was clear on what it wanted these resources to achieve but open-minded on how it was achieved. We discussed and investigated a few options to work out the best approach.
One option included sections loosely based around the headings in the Creative Health Quality Framework, with each one signposting people to further resources. This had value, and it’s available on the NCCH website as a generic information piece called Implementing creative health strategies. However, there was too much crossover in the information and resources applicable to each of the settings. This wasn’t a problem for some settings, but in closely related settings there was a risk of confusion.
Another option we considered was a best practice guide for commissioning a creative health programme. Again, this was useful and is available on the NCCH website as a general information piece called Commissioning a creative health programme. However, best practice is applicable to all settings, so there was no value in replicating it for multiple settings.
The third option we considered took a case study approach. For this approach, I would interview someone who had been involved in commissioning a creative health programme in each of the settings we wanted to cover.
The aim was to give people thinking about getting started with creative health a blueprint they could work from.
This proved to be the most appropriate approach, so NCCH connected me to five people involved in commissioning creative heath programmes in different settings.
In each of the interviews, my aim was to understand more about how the interviewee came to view creative health as an option, how they grew support for it in their organisation, how they developed and evolved the programme, any difficulties they encountered and how they overcame them, and so on. I also gathered specific information on the shape of the programme, the outcomes it is achieving and any future plans.
Following the interviews, I drafted a case study. Once it had been approved by the NCCH management team, I secured approval from the interviewees. It was then published.
The result
I really enjoyed working on this project – the NCCH team was great to work with, and the topic of creative health is fascinating.