Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-03-07
Topic: Health
Alan Thomas Howarth (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I will speak to only Amendment 114, the proposed new clause on creative health. While I fully support Amendment 184ZB in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, in view of the pressures of time today, I will not add to what I said on that subject in Committee. I am grateful to the noble Lords who have added their names to my amendment The term "creative health" denotes a range of non-clinical approaches to healthcare. These include working with cultural, natural and other community assets to effect a radical improvement of people’s experience at any stage in the life course. People receive expert support to engage creatively with, for example, the arts, crafts, museums, heritage and the natural world. There is a body of powerful evidence for the benefits of creative health, set out for example in the 2017 Creative Health report of the APPG on Arts, Health and Wellbeing and the World Health Organization Europe’s scoping review of 2019. Tapping into their own and others’ creativity has significant benefits for people in relation to a range of mental and physical health conditions, mitigating for example the distressing impacts of loneliness, anxiety, depression and dementia, as well as addictive behaviours and obesity. Health and well-being in social care settings also benefit significantly from creative health interventions. I detailed some of these benefits in speeches in Committee In the NHS long-term plan, the Government have already recognised social prescribing, and the National Academy for Social Prescribing has been established and made encouraging progress. With the establishment of the integrated care systems through the Bill, it is time now to examine a wider, systemic application of creative health approaches. In the new clause, I propose that the Secretary of State commissions a thorough review of the potential to integrate creative health fully within the new structures and the modern orthodoxies of health and social care I am sure Ministers will recognise the ways creative health can support them in their agendas. We know that creative health can help significantly with some of the most pressing, intractable and expensive problems in long-term health, including mental illness and obesity. It can reduce demand pressures on GPs, hospitals and pharmacological budgets. When adopted to support people working in the NHS and social care, it reduces staff turnover and losses. At very little cost it can support the prevention agenda, enabling people to have the confidence to take responsibility for their own health, and building resilience against ill health. Striking results are in evidence from creative health programmes in deprived communities such as Blyth and Grimsby. In such communities, through building confidence, energy, co-production, relatedness and social capital, creative health can prepare the ground to reduce health inequalities and improve productivity, serving the place-making and levelling-up agendas. So much more can be achieved if we develop creative health across the country These are the reasons why I believe it would be appropriate for the Government to set up the review described in the proposed new clause. If the Minister tells us today at the Dispatch Box that they will do so, we shall not need to legislate. I beg to move.