Strategy
Core Expertise
With a track record of looking at strategy devised by local, regional and national authorities, Rebecca is adept at helping organisations to target their work effectively. This might involve identifying groups who would benefit most from a particular change or suggesting ways in which problems could be prevented from arising in the first place.
Experience: St George’s Health and Wellbeing Hub Creative Health Strategy
In November 2024, NHS North East London Health and Care Partnership opened St George’s Health and Wellbeing Hub. St George’s is a purpose-designed building with a vision to integrate services across the social, health and voluntary sectors, to encourage, develop and maintain physical, mental and social health. Recognising the role the arts play in developing and maintaining health and wellbeing, St George’s Partnership Board commissioned Rebecca to devise a creative health strategy for the hub.
A key objective for St George’s Creative Health Strategy was to help bind the integrated services model, promoting a cohesive environment, a shared sense of identity, belonging and purpose and an impetus to collaborative working.
The strategy provides a framework for integrating creative and cultural activities into St George’s through environmental, therapeutic and preventative approaches, with the goal of enhancing service delivery, improving health outcomes and ultimately reducing care costs. Placing creativity and human connection at the heart of the service vision, this operates across three strands – Environmental Enrichment, Clinical Pathways and Healthy Living, Working and Ageing.
The strategy sets the direction for a Creative Health Programme at St George’s that is rooted in evidence, aligned with health and cultural strategies and co-produced with local stakeholders, staff and volunteers. This place-based approach forms a model of creative health integration that promotes recovery, reduces loneliness, encourages healthy behaviours and expands access to cultural opportunities.
Development of the strategy was funded by Arts Council England and supported by London Arts and Health.
You can read the St George’s Creative Health Strategy here.
Experience: The Greater Manchester Creative Health Strategy
In devising the Greater Manchester Creative Health Strategy, Rebecca looked at the priorities the city region had identified for itself, as well as recommendations made by the Institute for Health Equity and an Independent Inequalities Commission. Greater Manchester had committed to being greener, fairer, more prosperous, which included becoming a creative health city region, and these aims were shared by those responsible for developing the new health and care strategy.
Building on the focus of Creative Health, Rebecca identified key points at which creative health could help to mitigate the social determinants of health and showed how such an approach could make a significant contribution to Greater Manchester becoming a Marmot city region. She also illustrated the alignment of creative health with NHS England’s priorities, including Core20PLUS5, and she demonstrated how creative health supports population health.
Working with those responsible for implementing the strategy, Rebecca helped to build ideas for future work centred on:
- Leadership
- Knowledge
- Evidence
- Commissioning
- Workforce Development
- Communication
The strategy is now in its implementation phase, with Greater Manchester poised to become the first city region in the world to realise the power of creativity, culture and heritage in addressing inequities and improving the health and wellbeing of its residents.
To find out more, or to commission strategy work, please contact strategy[at]rebeccagordon-nesbitt.org