Background

In 2007 the Government launched Personalisation agenda under Transforming Adult Social Care. This consisted of four areas of transformation:


• Providing social care receivers with Choice and Control through the use of personal budgets

• Increasing access to Universal Services, making sure that all services are involved in the process of providing social care

• Prevention and Early Intervention as a means of supporting people before they have a high need on services

• Building Social Capital where people in communities can get involved and feel included.

 

Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage has embarked on a major programme of work to demonstrate how arts and museum services can meet these social care outcomes to provide community support, allow choice and control and access to services.

The aim of Wolverhampton’s arts and social care model is to enable older and vulnerable adults, including those with dementia, to continue to live in their own home for as long as possible by providing them with tailored re-ablement and well being services.


Development of the Service

The ArtsinMind service has also been supported by Creative Health, an independent community interest company whose role is to grow and sustain a wide range of quality arts and health work in the region.  Creative Health has provided project management, evaluation and training expertise to the programme, acting as a broker between arts, health and community partners. The company’s underlying principle is to place communities at the centre of the wellbeing agenda.

 

Pilot Projects

As a response to the statistics above and to introduce an arts and social care model, Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage led on twelve pilot projects in 2010, commissioned and funded by local authority partners around the region.  Evaluation data for nine of these was collected separately by the partners and is currently being collated by the Arts and Social Care Co-ordinator. Read the details of these pilot projects here.