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Creativity, Culture & Healthy Neighbourhoods – celebration event
Wednesday, 16 September 2027, 2.30-5pm
Rochester Corn Exchange
This special event marks an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of the Medway Creative Health Place Partnership, a pioneering programme that has brought together partners, communities, artists, and organisations from across Medway to demonstrate the positive impact that creativity and culture can have on health and wellbeing.
Over the past few years, we have built something genuinely significant together. Through collaboration, innovation, and a shared commitment to improving lives, the partnership has shown how creative approaches can help tackle health inequalities, strengthen communities, and support healthier neighbourhoods.
As we reflect on what has been achieved, we are also looking ahead, exploring how we can continue to harness the power of creativity, culture, and community in shaping a healthier, more connected Medway for years to come.
Enquiries – culture@medway.gov.uk / 01634 338319
Medway is harnessing the power of creativity and imagination to make a real difference to people’s health and wellbeing. We are all more than just machines, and it takes more than a just a quick tune up to help us feel good, stay healthy and get better when things do go wrong.
Whether its listening to a favourite song, watching a great movie or getting lost in an engrossing video game we all know that engaging with arts and culture can change the way we feel. Making things ourselves can have a particularly positive effect on how we feel: you might enjoy singing with friends, enjoying a peaceful moment to make something beautiful or taking photographs of the world around you.
In recent years, the evidence for the real impact of creativity and the arts on health and wellbeing has been stacking up, and we want to make the most of it! In the coming years we aim to ensure as many people as possible, particularly those in the most need, can access these benefits.
What is Creative Health?
Creative health refers to a range of approaches that explore how creativity and the arts can contribute to positive health and wellbeing. It can contribute to prevention of ill health, promotion of healthy behaviours, management of long-term conditions and treatment and recovery across the life course. Creative health practices can happen in all sorts of places including homes, community centres, outdoors and in cultural centres. It can help us to have a voice and feel empowered when things go wrong and help us feel better by celebrating positive experiences. Often, it’s about integrating creativity into everyday life and healthcare settings.
"Creative health is not just a nice to have, but fundamental to a healthy and prosperous society."
- The Creative Health Review
Laying the Foundations
In 2024, Medway received significant investment from Arts Council England and the UK SPF to deliver the Creative Health Medway Place Partnership Programme. This two-year-long programme was designed to:
- Increase the skills and capacity of artists and arts organisations to deliver high-quality creative health services
- Test out new approaches and establish new partnerships to support this work
- Develop a plan for the sustainable delivery of Creative Health in Medway
Through this programme, want Medway to become a national leader in creative health, working closely with partners across the UK to improve the ways we work and to better understand how participation in creative activities can reduce the health inequalities that we see around us.
It’s about working together… To deliver creative health activities effectively and where they are most needed, we’ve created new connections between the cultural, public health and voluntary sectors, which all bring different but equally necessary expertise to the process. Creative Health Medway is developed and delivered by a consortium of local creative, health and public sector organisations including Creative Medway, Medway and Swale Health and Care Partnership, University of Kent, The National Centre for Creative Health and Medway Council’s Culture Heritage & Libraries, Public Housing and Public Health teams, working alongside local and national arts organisations including Icon Theatre, Ideas Test, Nucleus Arts and Live Music Now.