Culture Benefits Your Health – And Society’s Too

By Natalie Giorgadze, General Director, Culture Action Europe. Reflections on the realities and challenges of the sector as discussed at the Culture & Health Forum, Turku, Finland. 

“Culture seriously benefits your health.” That’s the motto of Cultura en Vena, a Spanish non-profit foundation connecting culture and health. Their Arte Ambulatorio programme brings high-quality reproductions of Spanish masters into hospital rooms and corridors: ambulatory exhibitions of Goya and Sorolla have travelled through hospitals in Málaga and Madrid, offering patients and visitors a fresh reading of classic artworks through the lens of health and well-being. 

This dialogue flows both ways. With its annual Arts and Health exhibitions at Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Cultura en Vena curates exhibitions on mental health, breast cancer, and childhood, adolescence and ageing, reframing museums as spaces where health and culture meet. 

Musicians in waiting rooms. Clowns in oncology wards and migration centres. Dancers and arts educators working alongside doctors and nurses or art mediators in the classrooms enhancing youth mental health. Across Europe, these collaborations are no longer novelties. Slowly they are becoming part of the care environment, shaping how people experience health and social care.  

The idea that culture is good for people’s health is moving from the fringes towards mainstream. As the EU’s recent Open Method of Coordination (OMC) report on Culture and Health recognises, well-designed cultural interventions in healthcare settings support better health outcomes and well-being, while also improving the experience of patients, families, and staff. The OMC report, co-drafted by EU Member States representatives with Culture Action Europe’s Head of Culture and Health Department, Kornelia Kiss as an invited external expert, was officially launched by EU Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture, and Sport, Glenn Micallef during UNESCO’s MONDIACULT 2025 in Barcelona. The launch took place in parallel with the first Culture and Health Forum in Turku. Over 180 practitioners and researcher working in the field of culture and health attended the forum, enabling peer learning and joint advocacy.   

Blurred roles 

Step into the world of culture and health and you immediately see the complexity of roles at play. Artists in hospitals are rarely just artists. They become listeners, mediators, educators, sometimes even carers. With this hybridity come different responsibilities, expectations and vulnerabilities, or, as Eva Hallgren of Stockholm University puts it, fragilities and porosities. These blurred roles raise a vital question: are they a problem, a dilution of the artist’s identity or an opportunity for a deeper, more socially embedded practice? 

Finnish researcher Kai Lehikoinen argues that a paradigm shift is underway in socially engaged arts: artists are moving from the role of solitary creator (the demiurge) to that of facilitator. In socially engaged practice, and especially in healthcare contexts, this shift is striking. But are artists equipped with the competences needed to navigate such environments? The work demands a very different skillset: empathy, communication, and the capacity to share authorship. And it is not for everyone. Not every artist wants, or should be expected, to take on this role. 

Le Pôle Culture et Santé an independent cooperative in France, connects cultural and healthcare professionals and makes collaboration across these sectors workable. Its approach, based on the National Culture and Health Convention, offers a pragmatic way through the maze of mixed identities and roles. The distinction is made between (1) leisure activities (animation in French), (2) art therapy and (3) artistic creation (referred to as Culture and Health Cooperation Projects in the French Convention) within healthcare settings.  

Animation refers to the everyday social and recreational activities that support the quality of life of patients and residents within care facilities. Art therapy is a professional therapeutic discipline with clearly defined clinical goals, carried out by trained art therapists. These belong fully to the field of healthcare and is funded through the health budgets. 

Artistic creation on the other hand is cultural production and may involve artistic creation, co-creation with patients, residents and their families or staff. These artistic activities are carried out by the professional artists outside of the healthcare sector and are often a collaboration with cultural institutions. In line with the Convention, such cooperation projects are supported by cultural budgets in partnership with health, reflecting their place in cultural policy. This clear positioning helps to ensure high artistic and ethical standards, encourages rotation of resident artists, diversity of disciplines and perspectives, and by doing so prevents projects from becoming formulaic or repetitive.  

Learning from the French experience, it is essential to recognise artistic creation in the healthcare context as a form of cultural production. Support for such Initiatives must be accompanied with adequate investment and strengthened cultural budgets, ensuring that artists are sufficiently supported to engage meaningfully in these contexts without compromising artistic integrity or quality. 

Enabling conditions 

If blurred roles are the daily reality for practitioners, the bigger challenge is systemic. Culture and health cannot thrive on passion and goodwill alone. They need enabling conditions: frameworks, budgets, and policies that match what the public already understands instinctively: culture is good for us. 

The numbers are telling. Across Europe, citizens are far ahead of policymakers. A recent Special Eurobarometer found that 87% of Europeans want culture and cultural exchange to play a central role in the EU because they build community.  

The CultureForHealth report, commissioned by the European Commission and led by Culture Action Europe, has laid out a clear list of recommendations: (1) dedicated financial support; (2) knowledge and awareness‑building; (3) training and peer learning; (4) infrastructure for cross‑sector collaboration. These actions will make the difference between fragile pilots and lasting systems.  

And then comes the economic argument, one that matters greatly to decision-makers. Investing in culture and health is not only good for individuals and communities, it is also cost-efficient. Studies have shown that arts-based interventions in health-care contexts reduce stress, improve recovery times, and even lower healthcare use. Programmes like culture based social prescribing (or arts on prescription), where doctors refer patients to cultural or community activities, often lead to fewer doctor’s visits and hospital admissions.  

This matters more than ever today as we are living through a mental health crisis, with rising levels of anxiety, depression, and burnout. Loneliness has been identified by the WHO as a public health threat in its own right. Aging population increases fast, which means higher demand for long-term care. Add to this the trauma of wars and armed conflicts, the displacement of migrants, and the looming climate emergency: it becomes clear that prevention and resilience building are no longer optional. 

Culture can help address all of these challenges. Not as a silver bullet, but as a preventive mechanism that strengthens human connection, builds resilience, and reduces the long-term costs of illness and social breakdown. In a healthcare system under strain, this is not a luxury, it is smart policy. 

From art therapy to cultural democracy 

Too often, “culture and health” is confined to a niche, spoken about in clinical terms and judged by health metrics. To move beyond that frame, we need a wider vocabulary. Culture is not merely healing; it is foundational to how people make meaning, build relationships and imagine futures. As cultural advocates, we should resist to reduce culture to clinical utility; when framed only as symptom management, it loses the very qualities that make it valuable. 

That matters because instrumentalisation is politically fragile. If the arts and culture are justified only by lower anxiety numbers or shorter hospital stays, they can be dropped the moment another intervention performs “better.” The stronger case is culture as infrastructure: a public good that underpins human development, social cohesion and democratic life. 

The focus must move to cultural capability – people’s real capacity to make, share and shape culture in everyday settings: in hospitals and care homes, but also in schools, public spaces, workplaces, rural areas, streets, migrants’ reception centres. That capability is the foundation of cultural democracy: not just access to culture, but active participation and authorship. Cultural democracy anchors culture in rights and sustainable institutional frameworks, rather than in pilot, short-term projects that disappear when the funding is over. 

So yes, keep demonstrating health outcomes. But let the evidence follow a stronger narrative: culture is integral, not decorative or merely instrumental. Policy should treat it accordingly – recognising, funding and protecting it as an essential condition for both individual wellbeing and for the health of the social fabric we all rely on. 

The Culture and Health Forum on 29-30 September 2026 was organised by the Arts Academy of Turku UAS in collaboration with Taikusydän Arts & Health Coordination Centre in Finland, the Nordic Arts and Health Research Network and the Culture and Health Platform, co-funded by the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation.