We’re thrilled to share that Creative Care has been awarded the South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust Best Partner Excellence Award. This is a huge honour that recognises the impact of our partnership work with the creativity and health team, the integrated change team and Creative Minds on this project and our shared commitment to creating significant change in and through creativity.

*Members of the Creative Care team holding the award received for best partner during the South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust awards evening.*

The award celebrates excellent examples of partnership and the importance of working with others to achieve meaningful objectives. We’re incredibly proud to be acknowledged among so many brilliant organisations working within and alongside the health sector.

What This Partnership Means to Us

Our work with the creativity and health team and Creative Minds has been rooted in trust, mutual respect and the shared belief that creative health solutions improve health outcomes and change lives for the better. Over the course of the project we’ve managed to turn many challenges into opportunities; solving problems together as a team that includes over 24 creative practitioners, many ward staff and hundreds of service users.

Since its launch in June 2023 we’re proud to have created over 9,000 service users engagement opportunities in creative health activity, in nearly 3,000 sessions, and counting.

Thriving partnerships, good working relationships and working together with openness meant the project constantly improved and yielded outstanding results. Wards in the Creative Care project saw a significant 19% reduction in violent and aggressive incidents and a 27% reduction in incidents of restrictive practice.

We’ve been so happy to see this work increasingly recognised, including in an article recently published by the British Medical Journal.

A Huge Thank You

This award is not just a win for us—it’s a testament to everyone who has shaped this work:

The NHS Trust partners from the creativity and health team, the integrated change team and Creative Minds who initiated this project and work with us day in day out
The creative practitioners who bring care and imagination to every session
Every single service user who took part in a session
Our brilliant team and board at Everybody Arts who make our work possible

We’re incredibly grateful for the recognition, and even more energised for what comes next.

What’s Next

In the months ahead we will be continuing this impactful work in 13 wards across the trust with sessions delivered morning, afternoon and evenings, 7 days a week.

Our work this year has been enriched further by funding from the Baring Foundation to support mental health recovery of 500 male service users. In addition our new project Bloom, designed to increase young women’s entry into creative-health careers, has begun in 2025 thanks to funding received from the Pilgrim Trust.

We will also launch an activity book full of creative health sessions designed by our team of creative practitioners for service users to take home when their time on wards ends. We will also be commissioning brand new content for the Create and Bloom app.