What is the Artists Care project?

The Artists’ Care project is funded by Arts Council England and the Lightbulb Trust, and is a collaboration with three partner organisations who provide music and creative arts projects in challenging and complex settings – Good Vibrations, Irene Taylor Trust, and Hear Me Out, and two research organisations with specialisms in researching arts projects in such settings – the Royal Northern College of Music and the University of Wolverhampton, and seeks to answer the following question:

• How can supervision and care for those working in challenging and complex settings be structured, funded and embedded within organisational structures to ensure that artists and frontline staff are appropriately supported, maintaining the quality of their work and sustaining careers?

Why is this important?

Burnout is widely documented in relation to health and social care professions and has been attributed to working environment. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the impact of working in settings where there is a risk of experiencing secondary trauma can lead to high attrition rates for the artistic workforce. Research has found that the quality of care provided by health and social care professionals is significantly impacted when their own health and wellbeing are at low levels. 

The artistic workforce are often freelance professionals and there are challenges surrounding providing support for a geographically dispersed workforce. If artists are not able to provide their own care and support, such as through family and social networks or privately financed therapeutic care, they risk burning out and leaving the workforce. This impacts the diversity of the workforce as much as it does the quality that comes with a consistent and healthy workforce. 

What have we done so far?

We conducted a Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) to find out what evidence there is for best practice in supporting health and social care professionals within professions registered with professional bodies. We carried out 15,840 searches across 12 databases. From these searches, we reviewed 8677 abstracts of research articles that fitted our criteria. We then assessed the quality and the content of the articles, before carrying out a critical analysis to provide a framework of best practice in supervision and care.

What did we find?

Out of 8677 abstracts, we found six articles containing robust research evidencing best practice in the supervision and care of professionals registered by health and social care professional bodies. These articles tell us three key things:

1. Supervision, care and support are most effective when provided through a holistic model of self-management, peer-support and organisational support comprising:

• Formative: developmental support to help improve practice (CPD);
• Normative: support that helps to ensure practice is of high quality (assurance);
• Restorative: mental health and wellbeing support to offload and process (care)

2. References to the potential to experience secondary trauma, the impact on the sustainability of careers, and the need to maintain quality of care run throughout the literature analysed. Experiencing secondary trauma is a real risk to artists working with little or no supervision, support or care. This reinforces the need for our research into the ways Artists’ Care can be structured, funded and embedded to sustain careers and ensure a high standard of practice.

3. There is a lack of research into best practice within supervision, care and support for registered health and social care professions as much as for those working in professions without professional bodies that require the provision of supervision. This tells us that our research has an impact beyond the arts sector and that health and social care providers will benefit from detailed models of best practice developed through robust research carried out in the arts sector.

What are we planning to do next?

The next steps are:

1. To carry out detailed ethnographies of the three partner organisations so as to understand how each organisation works. This includes leadership and management, administrative structures, organisation, and how each organisation works with both employed and freelance professionals. This will result in three models of organisational practice.

2. Apply the findings of the REA to each model of organisational practice to design three different Artists’ Care programmes that will work for each model.

3. Implement these Artists’ Care programmes as part of a detailed research project to evaluate their effectiveness and understand how they work within each organisational structure.

4. Develop Artists’ Care resources for organisations, practitioners and funders:

• A ‘Guide to Artists’ Care’ pack for practitioners. 
• A practitioner facing event to introduce the guide and invite feedback. 
• A pack of materials to assist implementation.
• A set of benchmarks to aid funders in understanding whether sufficient Artists’ Care has been designed and budgeted for in proposals for projects working in challenging and complex settings.

What will this do for the sector?

This will:

• Provide models of practice that can be adopted and adapted to suit different organisational structures, in order to;
• Support the health and wellbeing of practitioners who work in challenging and complex settings, so as to;
• Ensure sustainability of careers, avoid burnout and drop out rates particularly for those without the financial, social or economic means to provide their own care and supervision through private providers and/or freelancers who are geographically dispersed and work in isolation from a professional peer group, ultimately;
• Sustaining the quality of the workforce and ensuring the standard of care given.