Creative Health Tree

A model of cultural engagement supporting health and wellbeing

The Creative Health Tree is our place-based partnership model that supports communities to engage in cultural activities for the benefit of their health and wellbeing.

Developed with funding support from the Thriving Communities programme in 2020, and a further research project commissioned by the GLA Culture Team, the approach we developed champions a strong, symbiotic relationship between cultural organisations and the health and wellbeing sector.

Working together with cultural organisations and Primary Care Networks in Tower Hamlets, we are continuously building a local network that supports arts and wellbeing for all, a ‘Creative Health Tree’ where organisations and communities are interconnected.

In April 2023, we entered Arts Council England’s National Portfolio. This enables us to continue our development of our Creative Health Tree model and extend our partnership working with local organisations to strengthen creative health provision in Tower Hamlets and beyond.

We now run a series of weekly activities from yoga to crafting, woodwork to massage which are available to socially-prescribed patients.

  • The Health Tree project was part of the Thriving Communities Programme, supported by Arts Council England, Historic England, Natural England, NHS England, NHS Improvement, Sport England, The Money and Pensions Service, NHS Charities Together, and The National Academy for Social Prescribing.

    We partnered with the Tower Hamlets Social Prescribing Service and arts and wellbeing partners Spare Tyre, London Arts and Health, Fevered Sleep, Outside Edge and Social Action for Health to deliver 421 sessions of culture activities, benefiting 523+ people: 53% from Global Majority Communities and 55% with disabilities.

    “Nothing but praise for this much needed 'tree of connection” (Network Partner).

    We increased social prescribing referrals from 3 in 2019 to 35 per month in 2022, created a network of over 20 organisations and were a finalist for the Best Social Prescribing Project (2022). At the conclusion of the funding, we produced a project report detailing all the work delivered by 2022.

  • The Greater London Authority (GLA) commissioned St Margaret’s House and partners to explore a pilot of Creative Health and Wellbeing Zones:

    • Hyperlocal centres of activity that are places where Londoners can connect with quality cultural social prescribing

    • With lived experience at the heart of the programme, the zones unite different parts of the health, social care, community and cultural sectors to ensure that there is no wrong door for Londoners attempting to access and participate in cultural social prescribing.

    Read the full report of this research project here.

  • Building on findings from our Thriving Communities Programme, we were funded by Healthy London Partnership as one of 12 Social Prescribing Innovators’ projects from across London to ‘find innovative solutions for using Social Prescribing to improve people’s health and wellbeing’ (HLP).

    St Margaret’s House worked in partnership with Social Action for Health, Tower Hamlets GP Cares Group and Voicebox Theatre to devise a project to support men’s health through a series of workshops and events, as well as training, engagement and co-production.

    The project explored the barriers to accessing social prescribing with local men, identifying what a more holistic programme looks like.

    Read the full report of this project here.

How can you get involved?

We’re in the process of working with Tower Hamlets CVS (Council for the Voluntary Sector) to set up a TH Creative Health Forum, bringing together cultural organisations in the borough.

We want to ensure that organisations are linked into local and national health updates/priorities and information sharing and understand how they already contribute to improving health outcomes for people in Tower Hamlets.

It’s about getting Tower Hamlets based organisations together to ensure we can all be part of the Creative Health movement as it grows and develops.

If you’d like to find out about this work, please email our Arts and Wellbeing Director, Beccy Allen.

We’ll be hosting an event for cultural organisations on the morning of Thursday 27th March. Let us know if you would like to join us.

Our plans over the next three years are ambitious and build on past successes. We will create a Creative Health Zone in Bethnal Green and the North West Locality of Tower Hamlets and work with strategic partners across the borough to develop Creative Health Zones in the other localities too.

Our work will expand to create relationships with organisations in Newham and Barking and Dagenham who would like to learn from our experiences, to set up Creative Health Zones in their local areas. We will continue to push the boundaries of the activities that might traditionally be considered arts and wellbeing to ensure we are at the forefront of innovation in this area and creating work that is responsive to the needs of local people who are setting the agenda as to what Creative Health means to them.

As part of all our work, we will integrate the Creative Health Quality Framework into our project planning, delivery and evaluation. Click on the image below to find out more about the Framework.

Where next?