Creative Health Quality Framework

The Creative Health Quality Framework is a ground-breaking tool that clearly articulates what “good” looks like for arts and cultural initiatives that aim to support people’s health and wellbeing.

The Creative Health Quality Framework, funded by Arts Council England, consists of a set of downloadable PDF resources based around eight Creative Health Quality Principles.  It offers clear guidance on how to use these principles to deliver safe and effective projects.

Working with the Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance (CHWA), I co-led its development - in collaboration with a Project Steering Group, Reference Group, and more than 200 artists, participants, health commissioners, and researchers - over an 18-month period between 2022 – 2023.  

It is designed to help all those involved in developing and delivering creative approaches to supporting health and wellbeing.  

This new Framework offers clear guidance on how to use the eight Creative Health Quality Principles to deliver safe and effective projects. The hope is that The Creative Health Quality Framework will inspire the best possible experiences and outcomes for everyone involved in creative health work, meaning the power and potential of creativity to transform our health can truly be realised.

The Framework rests on the idea that Quality is a shared responsibility – held by everyone involved in creative health, from participants and practitioners to funders and policymakers. This is not about defining or accrediting practice, but about creating greater clarity and consensus around a shared concept of good.

Image Credit: The Creative Health Quality Framework was designed by Jennie Ives

Client: The Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance

Funders: Arts Council England     

Date:  May 2022 - May 2023

Downloads: Creative Health Quality Framework and Creative Health Quality Framework Resource Pack

What they said

  • “The Creative Health Quality Framework represents a mature, nuanced and flexible way for us to consider what quality is really made up of and how we can create the best possible offers and experiences, and the impacts that matter most. It gives us a practical process for developing shared responsibility - within partnership and across sectors - and an understanding about how we each need to contribute.”

    Deborah Munt, non-Executive Director of CHWA

  • “This document will help us, as creative organisations, feel a sense of validation in the ways in which we work. In applying the Quality Principles to our work, it will help us strengthen and solidify our values and approaches.”

    — Anna Woolf, Director of London Arts and Health

  • “The Framework’s 8 Principles have many highly practical applications. Focusing on a person-centred approach, for example, will mean we start to build trust and relationships at an early stage; and ensuring we are sustainable means we can really develop a long-term culture of musical care in health and care settings.”

    — Douglas Noble, Strategic Director of Adult Social Care and Healthcare for Live Music Now

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