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Arts in Health Institute

Music, art, dance and drama in health care: what the trials actually show, what is still only promising, and how people get referred.

Music, art, dance and drama, and the health claims made for them.

Resources

Lists of organisations are easy to compile and hard to use, because a carer trying to get their mother into a singing group and a ward manager writing a business case need almost none of the same things. So this page is grouped by why you are here rather than by what kind of body each organisation is. Several appear in more than one group.

For the registers themselves, with the search links, see find a practitioner.

If you are looking into this for yourself

  • Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC). The UK statutory register. Four titles are protected in law and appear on it: art psychotherapist, art therapist, dramatherapist and music therapist. Free to search, and the first check to make on anyone in the UK using one of those titles.
  • British Association for Music Therapy, British Association of Art Therapists, British Association of Dramatherapists, ADMP UK. The four UK professional bodies. Each explains what its modality involves in plain terms, and each lists members available for private work. Note that dance movement psychotherapist is not a protected title, so ADMP UK runs its own accredited register instead of relying on statutory regulation.
  • The Cochrane Library. Where to look up what the trials found on a specific question, without an advocacy organisation in between. Plain language summaries sit at the top of every review, and the certainty ratings are the part worth reading.
  • This site’s own starting points: what happens in a music therapy session, what happens in an art therapy session, and how to find a music therapist.

If you are arranging it for somebody else

  • National Academy for Social Prescribing (NASP). The national body for social prescribing in England, and the clearest explanation of what a link worker is, what they can arrange and what they cannot. Most people reach a community arts activity through this route rather than through a therapist.
  • Your local authority or integrated care board’s directory. Unglamorous and more useful than anything national. Provision in this field is intensely local, funded in short cycles, and a scheme praised in a national report may have closed.
  • Alzheimer’s societies and stroke associations in your country. They usually know which arts groups are actually running locally, which is knowledge no website holds.
  • HCPC or your national register, before any private arrangement. Registration is a check on training and accountability, not a promise of fit.
  • On this site: how to get referred to an arts scheme, music therapy for dementia, and consent and safeguarding in arts in health, which covers the questions about capacity, photography and recording that come up as soon as a relative is involved.

If you are running or commissioning a service

  • National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH). Where most UK sector reports, case studies and practice examples are gathered. Read it for what is happening, where, and how it was set up. Read the underlying studies for how strong the evidence is, because a policy report and a controlled trial are not the same kind of document and the sector routinely cites the first as if it were the second.
  • WHO Regional Office for Europe, Health Evidence Network synthesis report 67 (Fancourt and Finn, 2019). The standard scoping review of arts and health. Useful as a map of what has been studied. Note carefully what a scoping review is and is not: it describes a literature, it does not pool it, and the study counts inside it are nested rather than additive.
  • The Cochrane Library, again, and specifically the certainty ratings, which are what a commissioning case should be built on rather than the headline effect.
  • Your regulator’s guidance on activity provision, whichever it is where you are, and your own organisation’s safeguarding and capacity policy. Both bind before anybody brings a guitar onto a ward.
  • On this site: starting an arts programme in a care setting, who pays for arts on prescription, and does arts on prescription save money, which traces the economic figure most often quoted in business cases back to what it actually came from.

If you are thinking about training

  • HCPC approved programmes. In the UK the four registered arts therapies are entered through an approved postgraduate qualification, usually at master’s level, with substantial supervised placement. The HCPC list of approved programmes is the authoritative one; a course not on it does not lead to registration, whatever else it offers.
  • The professional bodies each publish route maps, entry requirements and typical costs, and each has a student membership category worth having before you apply.
  • Certification Board for Music Therapists (CBMT) and the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) for the United States, where the route runs through an approved degree and board certification rather than statutory registration in most states.
  • Art Therapy Credentials Board (ATCB) and the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) for US art therapy, where credential titles and state licensure vary and are easy to confuse.
  • ANZACATA for Australia, New Zealand and parts of Asia, and the Australian Music Therapy Association for the RMT credential.
  • On this site: training as a music therapist and training as an art therapist.

Every organisation above is cited as a source. None is connected to this site in any way, and none has endorsed anything on it. Links out are for reference; see the health disclaimer.