News
4 April, 2025
Event
29 March, 2025
Event
29 March, 2025
Perspective
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
Theatre maker Anna Newell ignites the imagination of our youngest audiences through responsive, multisensory theatre adventures. Since autumn 2023, Anna has been bringing bedside performances to babies and children with complex needs in Dublin hospitals, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Children's Health Ireland.
Reflection
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.
Toolkit
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
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
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.
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