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Introduction
There is a growing awareness in the European Union (EU) of the critical role of culture and the arts in improving health and well-being at both the individual and collective level. Concurrently, the ambition to harness the positive effects of cultural approaches to well-being is growing at the policy level. Yet, designing sustainable interventions at a policy level that reliably implement a change of approach and strategy at practitioner level is no trivial task. This requires knowl- edge of recent developments in methods and evidence across disciplines, and an empirically based understanding of the enablers and barriers in the implementation of existing interventions with the aim of transforming approaches.
The research covering this field is vast, rapidly expanding and highly interdisciplinary. This scoping review aims to nar- row the gap between the fast-growing knowledge on the positive impact of culture and arts on human health and well-being, and the policies at EU level.
Good health and well-being are a fundamental pillar of prosperous societies. However, health policy across the EU tends to focus on disease treatment. A more ambitious and holistic approach to health and well-being that complements the biomedical model is thus required – shifting the focus towards health promotion and disease prevention. As the scoping review suggests, if such a long-term approach is combined with efforts to address exist- ing health inequalities, the result is likely to foster individual health, subjective well-being, and community well-being. Altogether, this could promote an economy of well-being as described by the OECD [2].
Despite these aspirations, reality is different. To mention one example, mental health problems affected more than 85 million EU citizens already before the outbreak of COVID-19 [3]. Since then, anxiety and depression have significantly increased, and current factors such as the energy crisis and the war in Ukraine could exacerbate these conditions further. In addition to this, many European countries have serious capacity constraints in their psychosocial support systems, often with long waiting lists. The European Commission is calling for a comprehensive approach to mental health, and it is of the utmost importance that it recognises and frees up the potential of culture to improve health and well-being. This is not to suggest that culture is a panacea for social ills; rather, culture can be embedded into broad approaches to address them.
The aim of this scoping review is to synthesise existing evidence on the positive effect of arts and cultural activities on health and well-being. This means the review is not limited to a few research questions but seeks to provide a clear indication of the volume of existing literature, the key concepts, focus points and the types of studies that exist. It also identifies knowledge gaps in the existing literature. Finally, it gathers policy recommendations and identifies challeng- es, further expanding the scope of the report beyond the proposed policy directions and specific policy measures.
The World Health Organization (WHO) published the scoping review What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? in 2019, advancing knowledge and raising awareness in this field. Our scoping re- view takes stock of the findings of the WHO report and further builds on it. It uses a similar approach in presenting the evidence on the contribution of the arts to health, adding the dimensions of subjective and community well-being to expand its perspective beyond health to the social and personal spheres. Moreover, the current scoping review also includes studies published since 2019, along with a special section on how culture and the arts have been experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and specifically how the online environment has transformed cultural activities and how this has impacted well-being. …
Referência: The #CultureForHealth Report is now available! – Cultureforhealth.eu. (2022). Retrieved 21 November 2022, from https://www.cultureforhealth.eu/news/the-cultureforhealth-report-is-now-available/
