Join our arts network

Our creative wellbeing program for CUH staff offers workshops, social sessions, and online resources. We work with teams across the hospital to make sure creativity is part of the CUH staff support plan.

'CUH Creates' are art sessions where patients, visitors, and staff can use their imaginations and try out different creative activities. These include painting, calligraphy, printmaking, and textiles. The sessions are held in small groups or one-on-one at patients’ bedsides.

Dance for Health is CUH Arts' flagship project; bespoke 1:1 and sometimes group-based creative movement and music sessions for our patients, led by expert practitioner Filipa Pereira-Stubbs. The program helps hospital patients feel better by building confidence, improving wellbeing, and gaining physical strength, so they don’t need to come back to the hospital.

Read more about the impact of Dance for Health.

There are plans to build two new hospitals on the Addenbrooke’s site – Cambridge Children’s Hospital and Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital. As part of our work developing arts strategies for these hospitals, we are working closely with the communications and fundraising teams to deliver a variety of creative engagement opportunities for staff, patients and the wider public. Our recent projects include a series of workshops in partnership with the University of Cambridge Museums, a presence at Luton Carnival, and drop-in activities at Cambridge Festival.

Learn more about how we work with the developing future hospitals.

As we grow our team and the remit of our work, we are developing commissions into our built environment. Working alongside our capital and estates colleagues, we will be seeking to commission artists to work on new building projects and refurbishments as we develop our hospital estate for the future. Creating calming, meaningful, healing spaces which are designed in consultation with staff and patients, and that reflect the exceptional quality of care given at CUH.

We are a team of six arts professionals who plan, run, and evaluate CUH’s arts-in-health program. With skills in different art forms like programming, curating, and creating, we work with artists and cultural groups to bring creative activities to our hospital community.

We are active members of the National Arts in Hospitals Network and the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance, supporting the development and advocacy of arts-in-health on a national level. Our programme is evidence-based, and draws upon a rich body of research and evaluation that underpins the sector.

Meet the CUH arts team.

Artists working with CUH Arts receive set day rates based on the A-N industry standard.

Healthcare settings can be challenging environments in which to work. We want our artists to feel safe and supported in the work that they do with CUH Arts. We welcome dialogue about any concerns or questions that may arise in the project development or delivery. We’ll also want to talk through your experiences of a session after it happens; sharing and supporting each other’s practice is how we start to practice well, and maintain the positive energy we need to do this work.