The arts and dementia: a social prescription for the best possible care

We are entering a new era where the arts in dementia care are being taken more seriously by national and local governments, research councils, public health, health and social care, and the general public in the UK and abroad. Even the high priests/priestesses of art and culture have begun to see the value of the arts for the health and wellbeing of people with dementia. The field has come a long way in a relatively brief period of time, yet more needs to be done to develop practices and programmes that will become embedded as part of social prescribing pathways for dementia care. This presentation begins by drawing on Camic and Chatterjee’s (2013) ‘culture and health framework’, a community-based partnership model, and their recent UK social prescribing review (Thomson et al., 2015) in order to provide a foundation and a context for arts on prescription. It will then consider the essential components of the arts and arts programmes in order to map them onto the cognitive, behavioural, creative, social, and learning needs of people with dementia. It will conclude with some thoughts about how to further encourage social prescription options for the arts from health and social care practitioners.