Creative health & wellbeing day

This event is part of Creative Futures 2026.

Creative health has never had more visibility, in policy, in the press, and across health and cultural sectors nationally, yet not everyone agrees on what it means, or even uses the term at all.

The Music Works’ Creative Health & Wellbeing Day brings practitioners, commissioners, policymakers and young people together to explore that tension directly: whether creative health needs a shared definition, why access to creative opportunity is still so unequal, and what it takes to sustain wellbeing outcomes once a formal intervention ends.

Across three panel discussions and live performance, expect honest debate, real practice, and young people’s voices throughout. For anyone working in or interested in creative health, youth work, health and social care, or cultural policy, and for young people who want a say in how these spaces are shaped.

Panel 1

What is creative health, anyway?

Creative health means something different depending on who’s using it, a clinical pathway, a public health strategy, a community programme, a policy priority, and some organisations doing this work don’t use the term at all, despite having real evidence of impact. This panel asks whether a shared definition helps a fractured sector speak with one voice, or risks overlooking meaningful, evidenced work that was never designed to fit inside it.

 

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Panel 2

The doors creativity opens: access, support and health inequality

The same barriers that block access to creative opportunity, poverty, disability, exclusion, are also the strongest predictors of poor health outcomes, so closing that gap isn’t just about fairness, it’s a creative health question in its own right. Speakers will discuss what genuine access looks like in practice, and why creativity can offer a route into support that formal services often can’t.

 

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Panel 3

Beyond the intervention: creative hubs and long-term change

Interventions are often measured by what changes while they’re running. This panel explores what practitioners and young people actually see happen once a programme ends, and whether hub models, offering ongoing connection, progression and creative community, could build more durable wellbeing outcomes than a single intervention alone, and what that suggests about how we choose to invest in young people.

Panellists, performers and creative workshop leaders will be announced soon.

For group bookings, please contact: creativefutures@themusicworks.org.uk