What the movement to integrate the arts and health can teach us about making research matter

Researchers, health professionals, policymakers and artists, including Grammy Award-winning musician Jon Batiste (above), gathered at New York University during the UN General Assembly Healing Arts Week in September to launch The Lancet’s first global collection on arts and health.

That mix was deliberate: evidence rarely travels by itself.

The collection, which shows how the arts “contribute to mental, physical, and social health”, offers universities a broader lesson: producing knowledge is only part of making research matter. We must consider how evidence enters public conversation, practice and policy.

Forty years ago, the Ottawa Charter identified conditions beyond biology that shape health, from peace, shelter and education to social justice and equity. Since then, we have built extraordinary systems for treating disease but remained less ambitious about creating the conditions that help people stay well. The unfinished challenge is now visible. Just as health requires thinking beyond the hospital door, research impact requires thinking beyond publication.

Translate evidence without flattening it

As a researcher and drama therapist, I have spent my career studying how the arts can improve health. Evidence now stretches across the life course: music and dramatic play can support childhood development while group arts can reduce loneliness later in life. Among 3,556 UK adults, weekly arts engagement was associated with a 4 per cent slower pace of biological ageing on one epigenetic measure. Across 149 systematic reviews, arts-based interventions have shown benefits for anxiety, depression, physical functioning and quality of life.

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The arts can engage several pathways to health at once: bodies and senses, emotions and imagination, relationships and meaning. They can foster perspective-taking, challenge biases and create dialogue across difference, often in settings that do not carry the stigma associated with medical institutions.

The challenge is no longer simply to accumulate evidence but to move it where it can make a difference. Researchers rightly qualify findings and resist over-claiming. But we must also communicate accessibly and connect data with human experience.

During finals, a young person in an international study from our lab carried a guitar to the park to sing and manage exam pressure. More than 80 per cent of the survey’s participants said the arts and arts therapies improved their mood and helped them manage stress. 

The statistic and the story tell us different things; neither substitutes for the other. A 32-image photo essay curated for the Lancet collection adds another form of translation, making visible what arts and health can look like across cultures and settings. The lesson is to use different forms of communication to make evidence both understandable and imaginable.

Bring different messengers into the conversation

Academics are not always best equipped to make research resonate. Artists, clinicians, policymakers, community leaders and people with lived experience can illuminate what an academic paper cannot.

When Jon Batiste performs and speaks about “social music” as a way of creating connection, he brings knowledge and public reach different to that of a systematic review.

Universities can create these encounters. Instead of treating engagement as something that follows research, researchers can involve from the outset those who might interpret, use or challenge their findings.

Show where change is already happening

Clearly, an orchestra should not replace an oncology ward but we have separated sectors that, in people’s lives, are deeply connected. Shifting that perception requires making new possibilities imaginable and socially acceptable.

One way to do that is to show where change is already happening. Clinical guidelines in roughly two dozen countries include arts-based interventions. The European Commission’s Culture Compass for Europe commits to guidelines on culture, health and well-being by 2028. Greece has legislated arts prescribing for mental health; Singapore has recognised the arts’ population health potential; and WHO/Europe has issued a policy brief on arts’ responses to climate change. The US states of Georgia and California recently passed bipartisan resolutions recognising the role of the arts in behavioural and brain health. 

Health systems offer another opportunity: to embed these ideas in practice and study what happens when they do. NYC Health + Hospitals employs more licensed creative arts therapists than any other US health system and stewards a historic art collection through its Arts in Medicine department. International research we co-led associated viewing hospital murals with greater well-being among patients and visitors and stronger workplace belonging among staff. 

Lifting up such examples does more than document progress. It can help normalise an emerging idea. Showing it taking hold in clinical guidance, public policy or health systems can shift perceptions of what is credible and possible. Economic evidence can widen acceptance. A 2025 US analysis estimated that music engagement for people with Alzheimer’s disease could return $2.40 per dollar invested, with an annual economic value of $5.1 billion (£3.8 billion) to $11.9 billion.

For researchers, the lesson is that moving evidence into infrastructure is not only a technical task; it is a cultural one. Evidence has to become understandable, imaginable and relevant to the decisions people face. Public acceptance, economic value and political will can then reinforce one another, shifting what people and institutions see as possible and, ultimately, what they are prepared to act on.

It also means asking more than: “Does it work?” What would a system need to implement it? What would persuade a policymaker to invest? What matters to the communities who will use it? And what evidence does each audience need?

The movement must go both ways. Public engagement is not simply communicating answers once researchers have found them. The people and institutions who might use our research can help us ask better questions in the first place.

The Jameel Arts & Health Lab-Lancet Global Collection on Arts & Health is therefore not the culmination of this work. Its real test is whether evidence changes practice, education and policy. The greatest advances in public health, from clean water and sanitation to vaccination and tobacco control, rarely came from medicine alone. They depended on knowledge becoming changes in behaviour, systems and policy. Our impact depends not simply on producing knowledge but on helping it travel.

Nisha Sajnani is a professor and director of drama therapy and founding co-director of the Jameel Arts & Health Lab at NYU Steinhardt at New York University. She led the Jameel Arts & Health Lab-Lancet Global Collection on Arts & Health, which was convened in collaboration with the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe.