Museums Health & Wellbeing
 |
| Patients at University College Hospital enjoying an object handling session |
Can museums improve your health and wellbeing?
This is a question we
have been tackling here at UCL Museums. We’ve been interested in museums’ role
in health and wellbeing for a while, so when we were awarded a 3-year research
grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council we set about trying to
answering the question: what is the therapeutic value of handling museum objects?
We focused this research around hospitals and care homes, as traditionally
museums have not worked particularly closely with these organisations.
Approach
Our approach has been
to work in partnership with a range of collaborators from academics, museum
curators, clinicians, hospital patients, care homes residents and their families
and carers, applying rigorous methods for assessing the impact of museum
encounters on health and wellbeing. We ran over 300 one-one and group object
handling sessions in hospitals and care homes and acquired lots of data during
the process. Using standardised clinical measures for quality of life,
psychological and subjective wellbeing, alongside qualitative analysis of
conversations from the handling sessions, we acquired a detailed and nuanced
view of the discrete ways in which museums impact individual health and
wellbeing.
Results
The results of our
research showed highly significant improvements in positive emotion, wellbeing
and happiness, improvements in patients’ perceptions of their own health and
optimism about the role of museum object handling as a distraction from ward
life that impacts positively on relationships among staff, patients and their
carers.
A Museum Wellbeing Measure
During the three-year
period in which we ran the research we became aware that more and more museums
were starting to address the health and wellbeing agenda. So this led to a
follow up project where we ran a series of workshops and surveyed lots of
museums to find out more about what other museums are doing. This work revealed
that not only are there many examples of interesting health and wellbeing
projects being run in the UK and elsewhere, but museums are targeting a range
of audiences (from older adults through to mental health service users) and
using a range of approaches to understand the impact of their work on
audience’s health and wellbeing.
That said, there is
still a huge amount of work to do to fully understand the impact of our work on
individual and community health and wellbeing. To this end we have been working
with around 20 different museums to develop a museum-wellbeing measure. The
idea is to develop a toolkit, which can be used, re-used, adapted and augmented
for use in evaluating the effects of museum encounters on health and wellbeing.
Watch this space to find out more…
Impact
Understanding the
impact of museums on health and wellbeing has never been more important than at
the present time. The radical reforms brought about by the recent Health and
Social Care Act, with a focus on prevention rather than cure and greater
involvement of the third sector, presents new opportunities as well as
challenges for the museum sector. A further challenge for the museums sector is
its financial future; given financial constraints and the importance of partnership
working we have been exploring the role of volunteers in extending health and
wellbeing programmes into community venues such as care homes, day centres as
well as hospitals. Funded by the HLF, our Touching Heritage programme is also
gathering feedback from the volunteers about the value of their experience to
them and their professional development. Find out more at:
http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/touching-heritage/.
So what is the answer to the question: ‘Can
museums improve your health and wellbeing?’
We think the answer is definitely
yes. Evidence suggests
that museums can help in lots of ways by: providing positive social experiences
leading to reduced social isolation, opportunities for learning and acquiring
news skills, providing calming experiences leading to decreased anxiety,
increased positive emotions such as optimism, hope and enjoyment, increased
self-esteem and a sense of identity, increased inspiration and opportunities
for meaning making, providing positive distractions from clinical environments
including hospitals and care homes, and
opportunities for increased communication between families, carers and
health professionals.
Author
| Helen Chatterjee
is Deputy Director of UCL Museums and a Senior Lecturer in Biology at
University College London. Helen’s forthcoming book Museums, Health and Well-being
is due out in Autumn 2013.
Further information
about the research discussed is available at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/research/touch
This blog is the
first in a series of three by UCL Museums discussing Museums & Wellbeing,
as Helen says watch this space…
