Arts in Health and Wellbeing - BCAT's story and some useful info!

Since 2016 BCAT's development within arts in health has been tremendous. We went from delivering 2/3 random workshops a month to delivering over 847 workshops between April 2019 and March 2020.

Over the years we have delivered some amazing projects - a computer gaming project with Leonard Cheshire for autistic adults, a Christmas show with adults with learning difficulties, an art exhibition for children carers, seen STARZ and STEP ON develop beyond what we expected within our libraries - all such positive news and such benefit to the wellbeing of our communities. 

BCAT will continue to offer free arts in health workshops as long as we have the funding to do so as it is important to us that accessible services support wellbeing as much as possible. 

Unfortunately COVID 19 has put the breaks on any community based work. Our major concern is that we keep people safe. As our community work is so dependent on others in the community, we will wait to hear from them before we kick start our services. It is such a shame that the momentum we had built has paused, but we are determined to come back even stronger when it is safe to do so. 

Below are a series of articles and research based articles around arts in health and wellbeing. 

5 articles
Arts Council of Wales: The power of the arts for health and wellbeing
Together, artists and clinicians can make a huge difference.
https://arts.wales/our-impact/how-we-reach-wider-audiences/arts-and-health
 
Sudat Kumar: past BCAT work experience - MA Practical Project Documentary - Importance of Music in Mental Health featuring BCAT STEP ON 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=61&v=2XaBkbyxImo&feature=emb_title
 
National Centre for Early Music  
Using Creative Arts for Health and Wellbeing – a training Day for GPs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQkPyQStXoc
 
National Alliance Arts in Health and Wellbeing
https://www.artshealthandwellbeing.org.uk/what-is-arts-in-health/national-alliance-arts-health-and-wellbeing