When reflecting upon how to best communicate the importance of this topic one, piece of advice was clear: put your most important takeaway right at the top.
So, here it is: Arts engagement is not a luxury, it is lifeline. A powerful social determinant of health, and a critical tool for tackling health inequalities.
Recently, I had the privilege of representing Public Health Scotland at the UK Arts & Health Parliamentary Roundtable in Westminster. Surrounded by policymakers, clinicians, and artists, the overriding consensus was that our healthcare system must urgently shift away from a reactive "repair shop mentality" toward sustainable, community-based prevention.
We are all well-versed in the lifelong benefits of physical exercise. However, as Professor Daisy Fancourt eloquently argued, we are currently at a "seatbelt moment" for the arts, much like the 1980s when the medical benefits of exercise were still being debated. Yet, we often speak as if we need to urgently persuade the general public that the arts are protective of our physical health. As Dr. Nils Fietje from the World Health Organisation highlighted, this is simply not true; the public already intuitively knows this. Recent surveys show that nearly 90% of people recognise that cultural participation enhances their physical and emotional wellbeing. The real gap is not in public understanding, but in translating this overwhelming scientific evidence into actual health policy.
The statistics speak for themselves. Research demonstrates that regular arts engagement reduces the risk of developing chronic pain by the exact same margin as physical activity. This is a crucial finding for two main reasons. Firstly, chronic pain is a widespread and highly costly problem within our society. By equipping communities with preventative tools like the arts, we can help shift our NHS away from an overburdened "repair shop mentality" and save billions of pounds in health and social care usage. Secondly, because we already universally accept and prescribe physical activity as a vital health intervention, proving that the arts offer the exact same level of risk reduction means creative health must be treated with equal clinical seriousness
Even more remarkably, regular arts participation slows down the way we biologically age by around a year, an effect that is the bigger than the biological age reversal we see from physical exercise.
The wider biological impacts are profound. Regular arts engagements show better cardiovascular profiles, lower blood pressure, improved cholesterol management, and reduced inflammation within their immune systems. The arts also heavily influence our cognitive reserve; those who engage regularly benefit from better preservation of cognition and a significantly longer time before the potential onset of dementia.
While it is easy to assume these benefits exist simply because wealthier or healthier people have more resources to participate in the arts, large-scale epidemiological studies explicitly account for these differences, proving that the protective health benefits of arts engagement exist entirely independent of a person's socioeconomic background or other lifestyle habits.
Crucially, creative health is a vital tool for equity. During the roundtable I shared my frontline observations as an NHS doctor in Scotland and highlighted how the arts can be used as a practical tool for reducing health inequalities. Because when arts are accessible, they provide a place and a space for underrepresented voices to be heard and thus they can be used as practical tool for reducing health inequalities, as engagement in the arts that bring people together across age, race, background, and lived experience, reaching communities that traditional systems too often miss.
Traditional healthcare systems can often feel "impenetrable" to our most vulnerable populations. Creative health interventions allow us to bypass these traditional clinical barriers and engage with communities that conventional systems often ignore. For instance, programs delivering digital theatre to primary schools in post-industrial, deprived towns are successfully teaching children mental self-management precisely because they bypass clinical environments and embed health directly into the community.
The UK is currently an undisputed global leader in creative health research and implementation. The sheer scalability and robustness of our models were powerfully highlighted during the roundtable by Nengi Omuku and Ebisan Akisanya, co-founders of 'The Art of Healing' in Nigeria. They shared how they successfully utilised a framework developed by the UK charity Hospital Rooms to integrate high-quality art into locked intensive care psychiatric wards in Lagos. Their work has completely transformed the mental landscape and self-perception of their service users, proving that creative health interventions are highly transferable, life-changing global tools.
Furthermore, as the World Health Organisation highlights, modern biomedicine has made extraordinary progress against diseases of the body, but there is no medical drug or vaccine that can cure social isolation or a life lacking meaning. The arts provide the vital social fabric and community connection that health systems simply cannot prescribe in a clinical setting.
Despite all of the overwhelming evidence, and the fact that access to the arts was made an official United Nations human right approximately 80 years ago, it remains the only official United Nations human right that is not routinely monitored. We must change this. Scotland is already a recognised pioneer in this space, leveraging our Realistic Medicine strategies to promote sustainable care. But to truly tackle health inequalities, we need more than isolated pilot projects. If we’re serious about prevention, we need to invest in the building blocks of health, and recognise the arts as a social determinant of health. we must officially promote arts and cultural engagement as a standard, protective health behaviour, just like exercise. By doing so, we can reduce the burden of disease, delay biological aging, and foster healthier, more connected communities across the nation.
My call to action to everyone across our public health and clinical networks is this: We must stop treating the arts as a 'nice-to-have' they are a necessity. Whether you are designing a new community health strategy, commissioning social care, or working on the frontline, look for ways to formally embed creative and cultural engagement into your pathways. By officially promoting the arts as a standard protective health behaviour, we can reduce the burden of disease, delay biological aging, and build the social fabric our communities so desperately need.
