Scaling-up Health Arts Programmes (SHAPER) – Stroke Odysseys with English National Ballet and Breathe Arts Health Research

A new network is emerging of creative ambassadors living with brain illness and brain injury. This half day event explores how we can work with them to support the changes they are effecting in our healthcare pathways.

Lived experience ambassadors – people with physical and mental health conditions who have participated in creative programmes designed to support rehabilitation and improve health and wellbeing - join us to share their journeys and tell us about the difference they make in their community and in healthcare settings.

Join an audience of stakeholders in NHS treatment & care and arts in health professionals to understand better the value of the patient creative voice.

During this afternoon event we will aim to demonstrate how the creative voices of lived experience ambassadors can work meaningfully and effectively within the care pathway and discuss how we can work together to promote this model as an accepted tool for mainstream care.

The day aims to:

• Showcase examples of where creative voices of people living with long-term conditions have led to the development of meaningful performances as part of their path to rehabilitation.

• Demonstrate the effectiveness of ambassador programmes in providing an audience for the patient voice.

• Highlight how creative voices can be a major part of recovery- allowing those people to come to terms with the reality of their new lives and educate students and practitioners about a new approach to the care pathway.

• Engage policy-makers with this new approach and discuss the benefits and practicalities of establishing co-designed programmes as part of the mainstream care pathway.

• Highlight the benefits of shifting research away from ‘being done to patients’ to true co-creation (i.e. led, designed and conducted by ambassadors trained via the arts programmes).

More about SHAPER

SHAPER is a large-scale study funded by the Wellcome Trust that aims to explore the impact and scalability of arts-based interventions for mental health in South-East London. The program is being delivered by a team of clinicians, researchers, charities, artists, and healthcare professionals from academia, the NHS, and the charity sector. It consists of three studies, focused on postnatal depression, perinatal mental health, Parkinson's disease, and stroke, and aims to recruit over 800 participants. The goal of the program is to inspire NHS organizations and commissioners to expand the scope of social prescribing to include routine provision of evidence-based art interventions.

One of the major challenges facing arts-based interventions for mental health is the lack of a continuous stream of funding, limited partnerships with commissioners, insufficient clinical evidence, and difficulties in implementation into existing clinical pathways. SHAPER aims to address these issues by scaling up three existing community arts interventions that have shown promising results in small-scale pilot studies. These interventions - Breathe Melodies for Mums (addressing symptoms of postnatal depression through group singing) with Breathe Arts Health Research, Dance for Parkinson’s/PD-Ballet with English National Ballet and Stroke Odysseys with Rosetta Life will be embedded in the clinical pathways of King's Health Partners (KHP), a collaboration of academic and clinical partners in South-East London, in order to reach a larger number of people in the community.