Delivered by Lime and jointly funded through the Joint Health Unit and Manchester City Council's Cultural Strategy Team, Manchester's Culture and Health strategy was established to demonstrate how arts and culture could impact positively on the city's health inequalities.

ABOUT THE STRATEGY

Manchester's Culture and Health strategy was established to create new insights into how arts and culture could make a positive impact on Manchester's health inequalities.

Delivered by Lime, in conjunction with the Joint Health Unit and Manchester City Council, the strategy aims to show how creative cultural activity affects health agendas and how creative cultural thinking can be embedded into the health sector.

Lime has gathered together a team of people to provide strong evidence to show that some of Manchester's most pressing health issues can be addressed through cultural innovation.

The project aims to show that through engaging with cultural and creative thinking we can work together to establish more healthy communities and a new health vision for the city of Manchester.

What Lime is doing:

• Demonstrating through grass roots projects how creative activity impacts on health agendas
• Consulting at senior levels with health and culture professionals
• Learning more about the commissioning process and meeting with commissioners to map out an effective process for submitting service level agreements from the perspective of culture
• Making arguments for investment
• Exploring training opportunities working with Primary Care Trusts
• Delivering “Juice”, a grass roots creative film making project working with young people exploring issues around alcohol
• Researching the outcomes of the creative work with young people experiencing alcohol misuse issues.

CULTURE & HEALTH CASE-STUDY

Launched in 2005, Manchester's Health and Culture Strategy seeks to address health inequalities through culture and the arts. One such example of this is Manchester‰'s Pathways cultural programme, which allowed 189 young people to be involved in creative workshops across the city.

In one of these Pathways workshops, a young man discovered his passion for creative writing, simply saying: “I would rather write now than go out and punch someone in the face!”

Academic research into the effectiveness of the Pathways project has shown how arts and culture can impact positively on healthcare, potentially saving the system thousands of pounds, and improving individual health and well-being.

The total cost for the Pathways project in 2005/6 was £100,000. If only 100 benefited (and a much larger majority reported that they had) then the cost per head would be £1000. Participants like the young man quoted above reported significant lifestyle changes through discovering their own creative powers and expertise.

If this has saved just one person an A+E visit including the ambulance cost and one day in a hospital bed, then we an overall saving of £450 has been made on the investment. This does not include police or criminal justice system costs. If you add to this the potential costs associated with this young man misusing alcohol or drugs or using mental health services, plus the costs associated with family anxiety and stress then the savings are huge!

A significant lifestyle change in just one participant like this could save the whole Pathways programme investment for one year quite easily. The numbers of significant lifestyle changes were 9 out of 15 of those studied in depth.

Pathways research was undertaken by Professor Carolyn Kagan and Dr Judith Sixsmith, the Research Institute for Health and Social Change, Manchester Metropolitan University