Creative Health Offers a Preventative Response

Creative Health Offers a Preventative Response to Declining Population Health in Norfolk & Suffolk

As the NHS and local government systems undergo significant reform, new national data highlights an urgent challenge: the UK is experiencing a sustained decline in healthy life expectancy, with profound implications for health services, workforce participation and inequality.

Analysis by The Health Foundation shows that healthy life expectancy has fallen by around two years over the last decade, with the UK now lagging behind comparable nations. More than 90% of local areas now see people enter ill health before reaching state pension age, increasing demand on services and reducing economic productivity.

The burden is not evenly distributed. A 20-year gap in healthy life expectancy between the most and least deprived communities underlines the scale of health inequality across England.

Prevention and the role of creative health

These trends reinforce the need to accelerate the system-wide shift from:

• Treatment to Prevention
• Acute care to Community-based interventions

Emerging evidence demonstrates that creative health can play a significant role in this transition.

Research from University College London shows that regular engagement with arts and cultural activity is associated with up to 4% slower biological ageing, comparable in effect to physical activity. Evidence also links arts engagement to reductions in stress, improved cardiovascular outcomes and enhanced social connection.

Creative activity therefore represents a non-clinical, population-level intervention that addresses multiple determinants of health simultaneously.

Norfolk & Suffolk: embedding a Creative Health system

The Norfolk & Suffolk: Region of Creative Health initiative provides a framework for embedding this approach at scale.

Supported by Arts Council England investment, the programme is:

• Developing cross-sector partnerships across health, local government and the cultural sector
• Integrating creative activity within social prescribing pathways
• Building workforce capacity to deliver evidence-based creative health interventions
• Supporting innovation in commissioning and data capture

This aligns directly with Integrated Care System priorities, including:

• Prevention
• Reducing health inequalities
• Supporting healthy ageing
• Strengthening community-based provision

Alignment with Marmot Place ambitions

The establishment of Marmot Places in East Suffolk and King’s Lynn & West Norfolk provides a further strategic opportunity. Marmot frameworks emphasise:

• Social determinants of health
• Community resilience
• Reducing inequalities across the life course

Creative health interventions offer a delivery mechanism for these priorities by:

• Increasing social participation and connection
• Supporting mental and physical wellbeing
• Engaging underserved populations
• Providing scalable, cost-effective prevention models

Evidence from practice

Across the region, creative programmes demonstrate the impact of this approach in practice.

For instance, over the last decade arts workshops in rural Norfolk communities for older people, including those living with dementia, long-term conditions, or loneliness, has shown clear, evidenced benefits including:

• Statistically significant improvements in wellbeing
• Increased social connectedness
• Reduced loneliness among older people and those with long-term conditions

These outcomes are directly aligned with NHS priorities around ageing, frailty, and mental health prevention.

There are many other evidenced examples of successful interventions for key priority groups, including children and young people and those experiencing mental ill health.

Critical Hope: a framework for action

The theme of the 2026 Creativity and Wellbeing Week is Critical Hope – particularly relevant in a period of system transition.

It reflects the need not only to acknowledge the scale of the challenge, but to act on evidence-based solutions that can be implemented within current system reform.

Natalie Jode, Executive Director, Creative Arts East, said:

“The decline in healthy life expectancy is one of the most pressing challenges facing our health and care system. Creative health offers a practical response – one that addresses the social determinants of health, supports prevention, and delivers measurable outcomes.

Through the Region of Creative Health project and our local Marmot Places, Norfolk and Suffolk have an opportunity to lead nationally in embedding creativity within system-wide approaches to population health improvement.”