Creative Health Hub

Welcome to the Creative Health Hub. We are a pioneering research and creative co-production hub with a vision of advancing and embedding creative health provision across our region in collaboration with communities across West Yorkshire. This includes local authority, voluntary, community and enterprise sectors, the creative and cultural industries, the NHS, health and social care services and universities to mobilize the Creative Health Strategy and drive positive change.  

Creative health is about connecting people, nurturing wellbeing, and creating opportunities for communities to flourish, even in the face of austerity. From arts and culture, to gardening and beyond, we champion activities that promote happier and healthier lives. We work in partnership to evidence how creative health can ease the strain on health and care systems and create nourishing and enriching places to live. 

We are the first hub of our kind in the UK, proudly supporting a creative health infrastructure that puts collaboration at the centre. The Creative Health hub is working in partnership with the West Yorkshire Creative Health Programme Board, established in December 2023, as part of the announcement of a creative health system for West Yorkshire (Mayor Tracy Brabin and Rob Webster, Chief Executive of West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership).   

Together with a consortium of partners, we amplify the visibility and impact of creative health initiatives, empowering communities to thrive. We are particularly interested in how creative health and culture are integrated, how creative health gets funded and resourced in places, how workforce development in creative health may be enabled within different sectors. 

At the heart of our mission is community connection. We believe in breaking down barriers and bringing communities into different spaces across the creative health portfolio, making it a shared home for learning, collaboration, and growth. Our Creative Health hub at the University of Huddersfield welcomes communities to work with us to realise the ambitions of making West Yorkshire a happy and healthy place to live.  

The Creative Health hub is a project funded by the School of Arts and Humanities and the School of Human and Health Sciences at the University of Huddersfield. The project is working in collaboration with West Yorkshire Combined Authority and core representatives from across the five districts in West Yorkshire. These include people from local authority, university, NHS, creative and cultural industries, voluntary, charity and enterprise organisations.  

For further details and information about the Creative Health Hub, do please sign up to our mailing list and newsletter. 

For direct enquiries, please email: creativehealthhub@hud.ac.uk   

The Creative Health hub is co-run by Dr Rowan Bailey, Dr Nic Stenberg, Professor Liz Towns-Andrews, Dr Stacey Durham and Dr Emma Andrews.