Routledge Creative Health in Systems: The People, Priorities, and Challenges Shaping Integration

Creative Health in Systems offers an accessible yet engaging guide to how arts, creativity, and culture can practically integrate into healthcare systems across England, demonstrating not only what is happening across the system today, but how readers can play an active role in shaping the next phase of Creative Health integration. Across 53 short chapters, the book brings together health leaders, creative practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and lived experience voices to comprehensively map how Creative Health is unfolding. It explores the diverse stakeholders and networks involved in these processes, examining how they work together to improve health outcomes. Readers are guided through the key strategic touchpoints where Creative Health is gaining traction, including public health, population health management, neighbourhood healthcare, mental health, hospital admissions, staff wellbeing and retention, children and young people, and creative ageing. The book also confronts the field’s key challenges, including short-term funding, quality co-production, governance complexity, and persistent inequalities. Chapters share a range of perspectives on planning and evaluating Creative Health provision, before offering a dedicated mapping section with practical tools, enabling readers to visualise their own systems and better understand where creative activity can make meaningful impact within their practice. Combining systems insight with grounded examples, Creative Health in Systems provides an authoritative yet highly practical resource that can be dipped into on commutes or between busy moments. This is essential reading for cultural practitioners aiming to work with the health sector, healthcare professionals looking to activate creative assets, and Creative Health academics wanting to anchor their research in practical application.