Art at the Start: Creative community intervention for perinatal and infant mental health

艺术起点：围产期和婴儿心理健康的创造性社区干预

• 批准号: AH/W007703/1
• 负责人: Josephine Ross
• 金额: $ 18.25万
• 依托单位: University of Dundee
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FW007703%2F1
• 关键词: Art; Start; Creative; community; intervention

The 'Art at the Start' project has been offering arts therapy and creative play sessions to promote the health and wellbeing of parents and 0-3 year old infants within Dundee Contemporary Arts gallery. During our project, we have managed to reach families who don't traditionally visit art galleries and have helped parents who have had difficulties bonding with their children to connect to together with them through shared art making. We have evidenced positive changes in the quality of family wellbeing via questionnaires, interviews and observations of family interactions which focus on the experience of the infant. Our project has been listed as an example of best public health practise and won several public engagement prizes. The proposed research scales up this successful approach, embedding four art therapists within four arts galleries across Scotland to explore whether the 'Art at the Start' model can be successfully repeated in different settings, widening access to arts spaces and supporting parents and infants across Scotland to build secure relationships.The NHS rely on community spaces to help them provide the first line of support for families with young children who are struggling with their wellbeing, but don't yet qualify for urgent clinical care. However, a special task force put together by the government to support parents and infants' mental health recognises that 'community' interventions need to be more sustainably resourced. In order to gain funding, services like ours need a strong evidence base. By bringing together researchers from psychology, arts and arts education, we hope to explore how we can both quantify and qualify the impact of our service; explaining how effective it is, how and where it works, and why. We will do this by gathering information on how people feel before and after engaging with our service, and by exploring which groups of people tend to visit the galleries before and after our out-reach programme. This is important, because access to arts is known to have a protective impact on health and wellbeing, but many marginalised groups in our community struggle to access cultural spaces. Although we have planned how to measure our outcomes, our research programme will also adapt as we go, taking into account the perspectives of gallery staff, local communities and NHS teams gathered in regular 'stakeholder' meetings. At the centre of this 'action research' approach is our art therapy team, who have been trained to reflexively adapt the service they provide depending on their clients' needs and local conditions. This will help us to learn how our service can be adapted to different cultural settings.Our ultimate aim is to showcase to the Scottish Government how we can use the power of the arts to provide a cost-effective solution for public health and wellbeing. Giving children the best start in life is important, because our parents teach us how to interact with others, and the love they provide is essential for us to develop academic and social competence. Poor starts in life can be passed down through generations, and the 'Art at the Start' model offers a way to break this cycle. Since both early relationships and access to the arts have been shown to have protective benefits for health and wellbeing, our intervention stands to have a long-term impact on the lives of the families we reach. To ensure that this powerful impact is heard by those who design and fund parent and infant mental health services, and by the cultural spaces which might host such interventions, we have planned a number of key outputs, including academic papers, a professional magazine article aimed at the gallery sector, and a policy paper summarising the project's outcomes to be presented in person and in writing to gallery, government and NHS teams. This will help us to show how arts and science perspectives can be brought together to present creative solutions to public health problems.

“艺术在开始”项目一直提供艺术治疗和创造性的游戏会议，以促进健康和福祉的父母和0-3岁的婴儿在邓迪当代艺术画廊。在我们的项目中，我们设法接触到那些传统上不参观艺术画廊的家庭，并帮助那些难以与孩子建立联系的父母通过共同的艺术创作与他们联系在一起。我们已经证明了积极的变化，通过问卷调查，访谈和家庭互动的观察，重点是婴儿的经验，在家庭幸福的质量。我们的项目被列为最佳公共卫生实践的典范，并赢得了多个公众参与奖。这项拟议中的研究扩大了这种成功的方法，在苏格兰的四个艺术画廊中嵌入了四名艺术治疗师，以探索“艺术在开始”的模式是否可以在不同的环境中成功重复，扩大艺术空间的使用范围，支持苏格兰各地的父母和婴儿建立安全的关系。NHS依靠社区空间帮助他们为有幼儿的家庭提供一线支持他们正在为自己的健康而挣扎，但还没有资格获得紧急临床护理。然而，政府组建的一个支持父母和婴儿心理健康的特别工作组认识到，“社区”干预需要更可持续的资源。为了获得资金，像我们这样的服务需要强大的证据基础。通过汇集来自心理学，艺术和艺术教育的研究人员，我们希望探索我们如何能够量化和定性我们的服务的影响;解释它是如何有效的，如何以及在哪里工作，以及为什么。我们将通过收集有关人们在参与我们的服务之前和之后的感受的信息，并通过探索哪些人群倾向于在我们的外展计划之前和之后访问画廊来做到这一点。这一点很重要，因为众所周知，艺术对健康和福祉具有保护作用，但我们社区中的许多边缘化群体很难进入文化空间。尽管我们已经计划了如何衡量我们的成果，但我们的研究计划也将随着我们的发展而调整，同时考虑到定期“利益相关者”会议上聚集的画廊工作人员、当地社区和NHS团队的观点。这种“行动研究”方法的核心是我们的艺术治疗团队，他们经过培训，能够根据客户的需求和当地条件反射性地调整他们提供的服务。这将帮助我们了解我们的服务如何适应不同的文化背景。我们的最终目标是向苏格兰政府展示我们如何利用艺术的力量为公共卫生和福祉提供具有成本效益的解决方案。给孩子一个最好的人生开端是很重要的，因为我们的父母教我们如何与他人交往，他们提供的爱对我们发展学术和社会能力至关重要。生活中糟糕的开端可能会代代相传，而“开始时的艺术”模式提供了一种打破这种循环的方法。由于早期的关系和接触艺术已被证明对健康和福祉有保护作用，我们的干预措施将对我们所接触的家庭的生活产生长期影响。为了确保父母和婴儿心理健康服务的设计和资助者以及可能举办此类干预的文化空间能够听到这种强大的影响，我们计划了一些关键的产出，包括学术论文，针对画廊部门的专业杂志文章，以及总结该项目成果的政策文件，这些成果将亲自或书面提交给画廊，政府和NHS团队这将有助于我们展示如何将艺术和科学的观点结合起来，为公共卫生问题提供创造性的解决方案。