At a glance
- Research across forensic, community, acute, educational and cultural settings in the UK and internationally.
- Focus on arts therapies, creative health practices, youth mental health, workforce wellbeing, and evaluation methods.
- Mixed-methods portfolio including collaboration on clinical trials, longitudinal evaluation, phenomenology, new materialism, arts-based and participatory research.
- Development of new tools (e.g. Living Logic Model, Southbank Centre Wellbeing Scale, tacit knowledge assessment).
- Strong alignment with Creative Health policy agendas, Horizon Europe priorities, and NIHR workforce transformation themes.
Our research encompasses collaboration on clinical trials, service evaluation, methodology development, and conceptual enquiry. We work in forensic, community, acute, educational and cultural settings with diverse populations, including people experiencing severe mental illness, displaced communities, looked-after children, healthcare staff, postgraduate students, and young people at risk of school exclusion. Across these contexts, we focus on generating evidence that is methodologically rigorous, theoretically informed, and capable of informing real-world decision-making.
Our research programme is organised around several interconnected themes:
- Complexity, creativity and health – developing process-based accounts of how arts practices contribute to change in individuals, teams, organisations and systems.
- Methods for complex interventions – designing and testing approaches such as Living Living Logic Models, tacit knowledge assessment, and mixed-methods designs that can accommodate emergent, arts-based work.
- Youth mental health and creative practice – co-producing measures with young people, evaluating creative programmes, and exploring cross-national variations in policy and context.
- Workforce wellbeing and organisational cultures – examining how creative and arts-informed approaches affect psychological safety, moral injury, and leadership in health and social care.
- Ethics, power and global mental health – bringing critical perspectives to concepts such as resilience, integration and wellbeing in transcultural and humanitarian settings.
Creative Health: our position
Our work is situated within the emerging Creative Health agenda, which recognises the arts as contributors to population health and as resources within health and care systems. We engage actively with policy developments—such as the NHS Long Term Plan, social prescribing, and Creative Health Hubs—while maintaining a critical perspective on how these initiatives are framed and implemented.
Creative Health encompasses a wide range of activities, from community arts programmes and museum partnerships to registered arts psychotherapies. These approaches differ markedly in their evidential bases, workforce requirements, and appropriate applications. We advocate for clarity about what different approaches can and cannot deliver, and for recognition that registered arts psychotherapists bring specific clinical expertise that is distinct from, yet complementary to, broader creative health provision.We are also attentive to tensions in policy. Social prescribing, for example, can offer genuine benefits but may, if inadequately resourced, function primarily as a mechanism for managing demand rather than meeting need. Our research aims to inform policy that genuinely expands access to effective interventions, rather than substituting lower-cost alternatives for clinical treatment in contexts where clinical treatment is required.
Current projects
ERA Trial: Art Therapy for Psychosis
PI: Catherine Carr (Queen Mary’s) Brunel Researcher (CO-I) Dominik Havsteen-Franklin
The ERA Trial is the largest randomised controlled trial to date examining arts therapies for heterogeneous psychiatric groups, conducted across multiple NHS sites in England. Prof Havsteen-Franklin and CNWL’s involvement focussed on the conceptual and methodological questions that arise when evaluating complex, relational therapies within large-scale trial designs.
CaRE Project and CaRE Intelligence
Researchers: Dominik Havsteen-Franklin and Jenni de Knoop
The Creativity and Resilience Engagement (CaRE) Team Development Project investigates how team-based, arts-informed interventions affect psychological safety, burnout and compassionate care in NHS services. The intervention has been delivered across Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust since 2019.
Quantitative analyses show significant improvements in psychological safety scores and reductions in burnout indicators. Staff report better communication, improved management of conflict, and increased capacity to support colleagues. They also describe feeling more able to provide compassionate care when working within supportive team environments. Our research examines these findings in the context of wider debates about workforce sustainability and moral injury.
CaRE Intelligence is the next phase of this work: a digital platform using predictive analytics to identify teams that show early indicators of difficulty, enabling preventive intervention before problems escalate. Development is supported through CNWL’s Pitch Perfect innovation programme and contributes to broader discussions about data-informed approaches to workforce wellbeing.
AWE Project: Arts and Wellbeing in Education
Researchers: Dominik Havsteen-Franklin and Jasmine Cooper
The AWE Project examines whether and how arts-based seminar formats can enhance wellbeing and psychological safety among postgraduate students, in the context of growing evidence of significant mental health challenges within this population.
Pre–post evaluation demonstrates statistically significant improvements in psychological safety across multiple analytical approaches, with effect sizes ranging from medium to very large. Depression scores show clinically meaningful reductions, with participants moving from “mild” towards “minimal” severity on standard measures. Notably, students who discontinued participation tended to have higher baseline psychological safety, suggesting that those with greater need were more likely to remain engaged.
The study provides quantitative evidence that arts-based approaches can help cultivate conditions conducive to student wellbeing, and it offers a foundation for further research using larger samples and comparative designs.
ENGAGE: Horizon Europe (in development)
Researchers: Dominik Havsteen-Franklin and Ivan Girina
ENGAGE is a €4.5 million Horizon Europe project involving eleven universities and cultural institutions across Europe coordinated by Anna Berqvist at Manchester Met University. It investigates how cultural organisations’ internal practices—particularly participation, co-creation and community engagement—shape wellbeing, digital literacy, democracy and employment.
The consortium includes Karolinska Institute (Sweden) for existential health research and health economic modelling, Finnish partners from the YOUROPE participatory democracy project for access to large-scale youth cohorts, Portuguese partners including MAAT and the Gulbenkian Foundation for social prescribing frameworks, Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Liverpool, and Sigmund Freud University Vienna with Swiss-Italian partners working on ecological digital infrastructure through the Social Aesthetics research programme.
Our contribution focuses on developing evaluation frameworks and methods that can capture both organisational change and participant outcomes, and on connecting these findings to wider policy debates about cultural infrastructure as a public health resource.
Games and chemsex rehabilitation
Researcher: Ivan Girina
This funded scoping project, conducted in collaboration with Impulse (a London-based LGBTQ+ health charity), explores whether and how digital and traditional games might contribute to rehabilitation pathways for gay and bisexual men affected by chemsex.
The work investigates games as potential spaces for structured social interaction, goal-directed activity and pleasure without substance use, and considers how such experiences might complement existing treatment models. Findings from the scoping phase will inform the design of future interventions and evaluations.
Tacit knowledge assessment in arts therapies education
Researcher: Daniele Stolfi
Commissioned by the European Consortium for Arts Therapies Education (ECARTE), this project develops approaches to assessing embodied and tacit knowledge in arts therapies training.Arts therapists’ competence resides partly in embodied capacities, such as sensitivity to non-verbal communication, skilled responsiveness to materials, and intuitive grasp of relational dynamics—that cannot be fully captured through written examinations or verbal articulation. Our work develops assessment approaches that recognise tacit knowledge while maintaining the rigour required for professional qualification.
AI, digital ethics and therapeutic practice
Researcher: Ivan Girina and Dominik Havsteen-Franklin
We are engaged in several strands of work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, digital technologies and therapeutic practice.
In collaboration with Mortal Works and Hxly, we contribute to research on behavioural AI avatars, examining consent, data ownership and therapeutic boundaries in digitally mediated contexts. This includes involvement in the AIRR supercompute gateway proposal, which aims to develop infrastructure for understanding how AI systems may support or complicate therapeutic relationships.
We have also developed ethical toolkits for online arts and wellbeing initiatives, recognising that digital environments pose specific challenges for safety, confidentiality and the dynamics of screen-mediated creative work. These strands of research support practitioners and students in thinking critically about rapidly evolving digital landscapes.
Creative leadership in the NHS
Researcher: Yemi Osho
Doctoral research in this area examines how leadership paradigms grounded in creativity and cultural awareness might respond to marketisation, moral injury and workforce sustainability challenges in the NHS.
Healthcare staff increasingly report moral injury when systemic constraints prevent them from providing care that meets their professional and ethical standards. Through qualitative and participatory methods, this research investigates whether creative and arts-informed leadership practices can help create conditions under which compassionate care remains possible despite resource pressures, and how such practices can be supported organisationally.
Art therapy, boys and school exclusion
Researcher: Kate Lenton
This doctoral research uses critical participatory ethnography to explore art therapy in academy schools with Key Stage 3 boys at risk of school exclusion.
Boys are excluded from school at approximately three times the rate of girls, with Key Stage 3 representing a critical period. Current Mental Health Support Teams in schools primarily offer CBT-based approaches for internalising difficulties, leaving a gap in provision for young people whose distress manifests as externalising behaviour. The research examines what art therapy can offer that current provision does not, working with young people as co-researchers through an Expert Reference Panel to ensure that findings speak to policy and practice.
Transcultural art therapy and displacement
Researcher: Liliana Montoya de la Cruz
This doctoral research develops culturally responsive art therapy interventions for displaced populations, based on fieldwork in Spain, Colombia, Greece and Asia.
The work critically engages with resilience discourse: when displaced people are required to demonstrate resilience, responsibility for adaptation risks being placed on individuals while the conditions that produce displacement remain unchanged. The research develops approaches that support creative capacities without reinforcing problematic policy framings, and it examines how arts therapies can work ethically in these contexts.
Parental engagement with refugee families
Researcher: Nehama Bauch
This doctoral research, submitted in 2025, develops a framework for arts-based parental engagement programmes with refugee families.
Findings indicate that language accessibility and supervision quality are critical success factors. Programmes that invested in interpretation and robust clinical supervision achieved better engagement and outcomes than those that economised on these elements. For commissioners, apparent savings on language support or supervision proved to be false economies.
NHS workforce transformation (in development)
Researcher: Dominik Havsteen-Franklin
We are developing themes for NIHR Programme Grant applications focused on workforce transformation through arts therapies. This includes investigating hybrid workforce models that integrate arts therapies within mainstream mental health pathways, examining cost-effectiveness relative to traditional psychological therapies, and identifying strategies for implementation in primary care and talking therapies services.