‘Patients referred to a general social prescribing programme experienced a nearly 10% improvement in social networks, the Field Guide says, ‘while The UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing reported that an arts on prescription programme resulted in a 37% reduction in visits to general practitioners and a 27% reduction in hospital admissions, resulting in a cost saving of £216 per patient.’
Against this backdrop, UK children’s charity Barnardo’s has urged the UK government to introduce a national strategy for social prescribing, while the NHS has seen over 2.3m referrals to social prescribing services. At the same time, it has recruited over 3,475 social prescribing link workers, according to The Guardian, to more readily support patients’ health and wellbeing.
And Dr Golden stresses that social prescribing isn’t entirely new territory when it comes to improving the public’s health. In a world of Synchronised Care, of Longevity Lifestyles, and the widespread recognition that wellbeing is about recuperative and whole-life solutions, social prescribing fits well as a whole-person approach to helping people thrive. It also offers health providers a wider range of tools, so they can tackle health not only as the absence of disease, but ‘the presence,’ as she says, ‘of complete wellbeing’.
But, while ongoing empirical research informs much of the thinking contained in her field guide, Dr Golden’s personal experience as a singer-songwriter, poet and performer more radically and intuitively motivates her.
‘As a touring artist, I was struck by how people responded to my work, especially songs about depression or about my family’s history of domestic violence, and how listeners came to talk to me after concerts about their own difficult experiences – often telling me that they had never told anyone else before.
‘So what was it about art or music or about a music venue that allowed people to share their story for the first time?’
‘We evolved to make and share art because it does something for us,’ says Dr Golden. ‘And part of what it does is expand our capacity for communication and connection.’ Creative spaces and practices help us make room for – and make sense of – the vastness and complexity of our experience. It’s how we’re wired.’
In this sense, Arts on Prescription, and her larger work around linking arts and wellbeing, are about ‘connecting people with opportunities to express, to connect, to pursue something that’s meaningful to them’.
From previous Back to the F**kture podcasts with Dacher ‘Dr Awe’ Keltner, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, we learned how music, poetry, painting, even nature bathing physically affect and chemically change the brain. Arts on Prescription applies those findings, inviting us not only to witness and explore art, but to create it – to write poetry, draw, dance, sing, design, play an instrument and more – to bolster our mental, physical and social wellbeing.
