| Summary: | Around the world we are coming to realise what Indigenous and First Nations peoples have long known: the creative arts are crucially important for our health and wellbeing. Today we have extensive evidence for how, in hospitals, the arts can help patients cope with serious illness, use less pain medication, stay fewer days in hospital, and rehabilitate much faster; how creative activity is often key to healing from trauma and mental illness; how the arts offer us pathways to death and through grief; how they bring communities together, preventing illness and keeping those with dementia and chronic ill health active, involved and flourishing for as long as possible. The Institute for Creative Health (ICH) is a national peak advocacy organisation that works to give all Australians more access to the creative arts, to support their health. In 2013 the ICH assisted both the Federal and State Health and Arts Ministers to endorse The National Arts and Health Framework, which stated that the Arts contribute to the health and wellbeing of Australian individuals and communities. This provides an ongoing policy commitment to including the Arts as a core component in supporting and improving the health of all Australians. BACKGROUND The Waiting Room Words Project is the Arts and Health Leadership Group NSW/ACT’s 2018 commitment to HAALP. It is our offering to the network of NSW Health and the Arts key contacts established by the NSW Health and the Arts Framework, to the Local Government Cultural Officers whose projects keep communities cohesive, to the doctors, nurses and allied health practitioners who include arts in wards and offices and clinics, to the patients and families and friends and carers and community who we serve. To further this momentum, the ICH designed the Health Arts Action Leadership Project (HAALP) 2017, which established Leadership Groups in Arts and Health in each state, who could undertake advocacy and lead efforts to consolidate principles and best practices in the sector. The University of Technology Sydney: Shopfront Community Program Graphic Design Students including Claudia Carroll, Daniel Giannone, Jessica Burdfield, Sylvia Zheng and Xinyue Wang Local Government Local Health Districts (LHD's) health and arts contact personnel, NSW Health Australia Council, Catalyst Grant The Institute for Creative Health Sydney Health Ethics, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney The Making Space Conference, Belfast, Northern Ireland 2002 ‘Yes they said we would happy to be involved’ And we are a little amazed, and touched, - if not a little grateful and inspired! We wish to acknowledge everyone who has been involved in this project. We have contributors from rural, remote, regional and inner city areas of NSW - from an inner city Men’s Shed, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art groups, an older women’s drumming group, community individuals, a year 5 class from a Sydney Public School and the staff, university students and lecturers, readers groups, artists, arts facilitators and the people from all walks of life who put their hand up to be involved.
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