• Sign up to receive newsletters from related organisations
  • National Centre for Creative Health 
  • The Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance 
  • Hertfordshire Public Health’s monthly eNews – to be added to the mailing list, please contact phnews@hertfordshire.gov.uk 
  • The National Academy for Social Prescribing. NASP is a national charity that champions social prescribing. We support and connect people, communities and organisations so that more people across the UK can enjoy better health and wellbeing
• Find your local Hertfordshire Healthy Hub here, to see if there are opportunities to include your activities
• Prescribe-Arts is a national listing of arts programmes with health benefits for the public – see what other organisations are offering and add your own work here!

Evidence summary for policy: The role of arts in improving health and wellbeing (pub. 2020) – “This evidence summary has been commissioned by DCMS in response to the World Health Organisation report published in November 2019 entitled “What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and wellbeing?”. This report synthesised the findings from over 3,500 studies on the role of the arts in the prevention of ill health, promotion of health, and management and treatment of illness across the lifespan”.

What good looks like: The Creative Health Quality Framework, “a ground-breaking tool that clearly articulates what “good” looks like for creative and cultural initiatives that aim to support people’s health and wellbeing”. This was published in 2023 by the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance, and it is being promoted nationally. 

Measuring your impact – arts and health evaluation advice and tools:

• I want to evaluate my work… (culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk)
• Evaluating what works for place-based arts and culture – What Works Wellbeing
• Arts and Health Evaluation: Navigating the Landscape (2023)
  This resource provides a comprehensive mapping of what arts and health evaluation frameworks and toolkits exist, as well as provides general tips and advice. It is designed to support anyone interested in arts and health to navigate the landscape of evaluation. The resource is in five parts: what is evaluation in the context of arts and health; evaluation frameworks; evaluation toolkits; evaluation tools; analysing evaluation data and disseminating findings.
• Arts for Health and Wellbeing – an evaluation framework:
  Commissioned by Public Health England (PHE) and researched and written by Professor Norma Daykin (University of Winchester and UWE, Bristol) and Tim Joss, Chief Executive of Aesop the framework provides guidance on appropriate ways of documenting the impacts of arts for health and wellbeing projects and programmes.

• Creative & Credible
  Creative & Credible supports arts and health organisations and practitioners to understand why you might need to evaluate, what approaches might be appropriate, and to plan and implement evaluation for your project. You will also find downloadable handouts, examples and links to other evaluation resources.

The Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance.
The Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance is the sole free-to-join membership organisation for creative health across England. We provide networked, collaborative advocacy, support and resources, supporting health and wellbeing for all through creative and cultural practice.

The National Centre for Creative Health.
We 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 system.

Creativity and Wellbeing Week.
Creativity and Wellbeing week in May is run by London Arts in Health and the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance. The festival allows thousands of people across the UK to participate in culture and creative activities.

You can promote your own events. Events can take any art form and can be held in clinical settings, cultural buildings or in the community – if they involve either accessing or participating in cultural activities that improve health or wellbeing.

Available health and wellbeing demographic data for Hertfordshire. 

There are key sources of health and wellbeing data that already collect and present it for you:

*Start here* Evidencing the need: health and wellbeing evidence sources. This interactive guide helps Hertfordshire Voluntary and Community organisations find relevant evidence to inform their services and potentially help them complete funding applications.* 

Herts Insight – this website is a good first stop for demographic data – topics include Wellbeing and Health, as well as Population, Housing and Transport, and more. The data sources are census and government statistics and are automatically updated to the latest information.

Herts Insight is maintained by HCC’s Community Intelligence team.

• What is Herts Insight and how to use it
• Email Herts Insight at HertsInsight@hertfordshire.gov.uk

Herts Health Evidence – online data reports and summaries for insight and further analysis, plus evaluation support – provided by Hertfordshire Public Health Evidence and Intelligence (inc. we have delivered workshops with local groups about introduction to evaluation) 

Our most popular resources include:

• District health profiles for Herts and West Essex, that summarise key health indicators in one place. There are also District health infographics for Herts and West Essex from the same data.
• The Young People’s Health & Wellbeing Survey is completed by 11-19 year olds acrss the county each year. There were 16,000 responses in 2023 survey. For example, 54% of the young people who replied to the survey said that they coped with their problems by ‘listening to music’ – it was the most popular answer for the fourth year in a row, above ‘talking to friends or family’.  

Hertfordshire’s Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) site includes health needs assessments for specific issues across the life course as well as working group recommendations from health and social care partnerships.

There are free, available to anyone and have accessible versions – there are also quick JSNA on a page versions of some topics available!

To give you some ideas of the topics available relating to children and young people, see the links below or click here for a full list:

• Autism Spectrum Disorder (Feb 2023)
• Body Positivity (March 2022)
• Cancer (March 2020)
• Children Looked After (June 2021)
• Diabetes (July 2022)
• Food Poverty (August 2021)
• Oral Health (November 2023)
• Overweight and Obesity (Nov 2021) 
• SEND 0-25 (December 2022)
• There are also various resources on aspects of Self-Harm

These are updated over couple of years. If there is a topic you are interested in, please ask us.

Also, if you need to plan services for residents with ‘protected characteristics’, Hertfordshire JSNAs include appendices looking at the impact of a health issue on these groups, to help specify the ‘needs’ of specific groups in our communities and to help write Equality Impact Assessments.

If you want to find more yourself:

Fingertips is a large public health data collection (developed by the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities). Data is organised into themed profiles.

Fingertips profiles are a rich source of indicators across a range of health and wellbeing themes. They are designed to support Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) and commissioning to improve health and wellbeing and reduce inequalities. With these profiles you can:

• browse indicators at different geographical levels
• benchmark against the regional or England average
• export data to use locally
• Guidance on how to use Fingertips is here

Local Health is another government site that includes quality assured small area health-related data visualised in maps, charts, area profiles, and reports.

• You can create maps overlaid with local health data to add in your reports and share with colleagues. 
• Guidance on how to use Local Health is here