What's New
Opportunity
Arts + Health Artist Bursaries 2025
23 April, 2025
News
Have your say! WHO Policy Brief on arts and young people’s mental health
18 April, 2025
Event
Bealtaine Festival 2025 – Celebrating 30 years of arts and creativity as we age
18 April, 2025
Opportunity
Creative Exchanges: Age & Opportunity Summer 2025 Course at IMMA
14 April, 2025
Event
Bookings open! Arts + Health Check Up, Check In 2025 – Keynote Speaker Dr Tony Bates
9 April, 2025
News
Stories from my Kitchen Table – Exhibition hosted by St. Luke’s Radiation Oncology Network
4 April, 2025
Explore
Perspective
Six challenges facing arts and health
Alex Cothren and Tully Barnett from Flinders University talked to members of 22 arts and health organisations across the globe for their 2024 report, What does an arts and health organisation do? Across wide-ranging approaches to advancing this work, they discovered commonalities in the challenges facing these organisations. They summarise six key challenges and some of the solutions adopted by arts and health organisations to overcome them.
Case Study
Cavan Singers – Celebrating Forty Years of Community Singing
Cavan Singers began life as a community choir on Valentine's Day 1984. To celebrate our 40 years of singing together, we conducted an informal survey of members to find out what it means to be part of a community choir. What emerged was a triad of interconnected themes - Music, Community and Self - and a realisation that singing together over a sustained period was having a profound effect on our individual mental and emotional wellbeing.
Reflection
Reflecting on arts and health practice by Luci Kershaw
Luci Kershaw is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores health topics and themes, as well as more traditional practice within the area of arts and health. Luci was awarded the artsandhealth.ie Emerging Artist Bursary in 2024 and has spent her time exploring how to embrace more collaborative approaches to sharing people’s stories through sound and film.
Resources
Toolkit
Adapting and implementing arts and health interventions: A thinking tool
WHO and local partners implemented a singing for postpartum depression intervention in three countries (Denmark, Italy, and Romania), in order to investigate whether this intervention could translate to different cultural contexts. Based on the experience of conducting this study, this thinking tool has been developed to highlight key considerations that can be taken when adapting existing arts and health interventions to different cultural contexts.
Research & Evaluation
Arts-based interventions for maternal well-being: a systematic review
This systematic review examines published studies that explore the relationship between arts-based activity and maternal health and/or wellbeing. The results suggest that there is a role for arts-based interventions to be used as social support for women during the transition to motherhood; to facilitate recovery from diagnosed mental disorders such as postnatal depression; and to prevent stress, anxiety and isolation.
Policy & Strategy
Compassionate Communities Position Paper
The compassionate communities approach is one in which caregiving, dying, death and grief are shared responsibilities of the whole community, complementing formal services dedicated to end-of-life care by fostering local networks of care and compassion. This position paper, developed as part of the ongoing all-Ireland Compassionate Communities research project, includes the role of the arts in facilitating discussions around emotive topics and helping to develop a compassionate culture.
