Matt Hancock, the new Health and Social Care Secretary, took to twitter to promote ‘access to evidence-based treatments that have been shown to both improve people’s physical and mental well-being’, linking to an article promoting social prescribing to arts and gardening clubs. His tweet can be found here.
This approach was welcomed by Ed Vaizey, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing. He said ‘Arts and culture can have a transformative effect on health at every stage of a person’s life. Fantastic to see such innovative thinking from the new health sec’.
The Heritage Alliance is currently working on a timely report on the interplay between Heritage and Health. Members are encouraged to submit relevant case studies and evidence to HAintern@theheritagealliance.org.uk.
Matt Hancock reiterated this message in a speech to hospital staff, given on July 20th. He explicitly stated that he wanted ‘to reduce the over-prescription of unsophisticated drugs in favour of approaches like social prescribing which address someone’s physical and mental well-being’.