World's largest study into impact of arts on physical and mental health
KING'S COLLEGE LONDON - NEWS RELEASE 30-OCT-2019
The world's largest ever study into the impact and scalability of arts interventions on physical and mental health has been launched today by King's College London and UCL, supported by a £2m award from Wellcome Trust.
Interventions that have been proven to improve patient health, such as singing groups for postnatal depression, dance classes for people with Parkinson's and movement and music sessions for stroke patients will be trialled among larger groups of people within NHS hospitals and health centres.
SHAPER - Scaling-up Health-Arts Programmes: Implementation and Effectiveness Research - will be led by Professor Carmine Pariante, Professor of Biological Psychiatry at King's College London and Dr Daisy Fancourt, Associate Professor of Psychobiology & Epidemiology at UCL, alongside a multidisciplinary team of artists, scientists and clinicians brought together by research manager, Dr Tony Woods, and arts advisor, Nikki Crane.
"There is growing research on the impact of the arts on health. But more work is needed to take programmes from successful local projects with short-term funding to national programmes commissioned by the health sector. SHAPER will see arts interventions embedded into NHS hospitals, clinics and in the community so that we can assess their effectiveness in improving the health and wellbeing of greater numbers of patients," says Professor Pariante. [...]