Arts and Health Evaluation Toolkit (AHET)

The field of arts and health is rapidly evolving, with a focus on bringing arts and cultural activities to communities or clinical populations to improve various aspects of their health and well-being. Music has shown promise in enhancing memory for dementia patients, visual arts have helped individuals cope with trauma, and dance can be beneficial for physical rehabilitation (Fancourt & Finn, 2019), to name a few of the many health benefits identified. Despite the growing popularity of arts-for-health interventions, there is a lack of standardized measures or tools to assess the impact of arts on health and wellness. Many artists/arts organisations focus on program evaluation, but do not know how to address outcome or impact evaluation, which are increasingly requested by funders and donors. Further, there are currently few randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the gold standard for evaluating interventions in medicine. In other words, there is a swiftly growing need to conduct formal evaluation in the area of Arts and health.

To address this gap, we are developing an Arts and Health Evaluation Toolkit (AHET), which will provide a set of tools for outcome and impact evaluation of arts, cultural, and heritage activities for health and well-being. The toolkit will provide descriptions of qualitative and quantitative measures for arts-for-health researchers, along with practical guidance, use cases, and an assessment of their advantages and disadvantages. We will create a digital booklet featuring the Arts for Health Evaluation Toolkit, to disseminate the AHET to the arts and scientific/medical communities. Our goal is to stimulate effective and consistent evaluation practices, and encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and scientists/clinicians.

This project is being undertaken by the Centre of Music and Health, in conjunction with the National Gallery Singapore, and has been funded in part by the National Arts Council (NAC) of Singapore (Nov 2023 - Nov 2025).