Creative activity, health and wellbeing: Developing research priorities and questions with key stakeholders

A report on two participatory workshop events held in 2016 at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the University of Huddersfield. We hosted two workshops, run as World Café style events and attended by a variety of broadly defined stakeholders (service users and carers; creative professionals; health and social care professionals; total =81 attendees). The purpose of the events was to reflect on the impact of creativity on health and well-being, and to establish key research priorities and questions from attendees’ varying perspectives. In addition to providing useful guidance to develop future work, findings reported here themselves begin to evidence the successes already achieved by those working to use creative activity to improve health and well-being in our locality. The workshops produced a large amount of rich, interesting data and were well received by those attending. The approach and methods used worked well to reduce communicative barriers and encourage sharing of perspectives between different stakeholder types.