The National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) is a registered Charity with a board of trustees and a small staff team. We are supported by a UK-wide Advisory Group. Creative Health Champions are a network of senior leaders representing NHS Trusts, Local Authorities, Health and Wellbeing Boards and Clinical Commissioning Groups in England. NCCH holds the Secretariat for a GP SIG which is supported by the RCGP, and an International Arts in Pharmacy Special Interest Group.
NCCH was launched in March 2021. It was formed in response to Recommendation 1 in the Creative Health report, the result of a two year inquiry led by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Arts, Health and Wellbeing. The NCCH’s mission is to: advance good practice and research, inform policy and promote collaboration, helping foster the conditions for creative health to be integral to health and social care and wider systems.
Our priorities are: health inequalities; advancing good practice and research; informing policy; and promoting collaboration. We are working with a range of partners and stakeholders across the UK to create place-based ‘Hubs’, develop partnership and collaboration ‘Hives’ and co-produce creative learning in ‘Huddles’.
Learning will be shared between Hubs, Hives and Huddles with the aim to help foster the conditions in which creative health approaches can become integral to health and care and wider systems over time.
We are working with Integrated Care Systems in Gloucestershire; West Yorkshire; Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin; and Suffolk and North East Essex to explore models for integrating creative health at a systems level. This programme is supported by NHS England. We are developing a Creative Health toolkit which will support Integrated Care Systems across the country.
With the support of Arts Council England we are delivering the Creative Health Associates Programme with seven Creative Health Associates hosted by Integrated Care Boards, one in each NHS region.
National organisations and networks
We are working with Care England to explore how we can engage with and support the wider care sector.
We have a Memorandum of Understanding with the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance and the LENs (Lived Experience Network). They are key partners for the NCCH in connecting to their regional champions and networks of more than 5000 members.
We are working with the National Academy for Social Prescribing to support work across shared priority areas and regional infrastructure development.
