Troubleshooting Social Prescribing and the Arts in East London: Qualitative Findings From Community Arts Organisations and Link Workers

Abstract

Engagement in the arts has been shown to benefit health by supporting both prevention and treatment, leading to the concept of creative health. The social prescribing agenda has spurred the development of dedicated arts on prescription programmes; however, the creative health agenda is mostly delivered by community arts organisations which lack a specific brief for health and whose contribution to social prescribing is under-researched. Supported by Creative Wick, an independent nonprofit, community interest company based in East London, we investigated the practice, viability, and challenges of social prescribing of the arts within the two London boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Hackney. Qualitative, in-depth semistructured interviews were conducted with 13 community artists and four primary care link workers, and the findings were thematically analysed. We found that both artists and link workers lacked reciprocal knowledge, with link workers mostly unaware of the rich local offer, and artists either unaware of the social prescribing model or only indirectly informed through the influx of referred participants. We also found that a lack of standards in quality assurance for community arts organisations was perceived as a barrier to consistent referral by link workers. Moreover, the shortage and instability of funding for community arts organisations makes the model extremely precarious. On the positive side, both artists and link workers supported the idea of integrating community arts engagement into healthcare. Drawing from our findings, we propose that supporting community arts organisations to deliver creative health requires at least three key elements: stable funding, possibly through statutory provision within healthcare; a system of quality assurance and evaluation which accounts for a context-specific, nonmedicalised approach; and the implementation of virtuous referral pathways grounded in reciprocal knowledge. As the creative health agenda is considered vital for public health, integrating the contribution of community arts organisations becomes essential.