Social prescribing provides a means for enabling primary care services to refer patients and service users with social, emotional or practical needs to a range of local, non-clinical services, often provided by the voluntary and community sector (VCS). Such non-clinical approaches are gaining added resonance in the mental health care sector due to their proactive, preventive qualities, and the opportunities created to provide strategically 'joined up' services across a range of cross-sector organisations. Within the Liverpool city region, there are many examples of hugely effective arts-based interventions and initiatives in mental health care, spear-headed by Mersey Care NHS Trust and leading arts and cultural organisations including National Museums Liverpool, Tate Liverpool and The Reader Organisation. The proposed network seeks to build upon the learning outcomes generated by these initiatives and associated research programmes to inform the strategic development of arts-based social prescribing in the city, including a co-produced policy framework for participating organisations, and an accompanying 'how-to' guide for applied research on the arts and social prescribing in mental health. This will be achieved via a series of themed research development workshops, with participants drawn from academia and relevant policy and practice communities. The regional model will then be used to inform national debate and policy development during a conference event to be held at the end of the funded period.

Culture and the arts contribute to health and wellbeing and can help shift the focus away from disease to viewing health in its broader context, focused around people. Culture and the arts can also contribute to addressing more complex health equity problems for which there are very few health care solutions. Whilst Liverpool has a rich heritage of arts and culture, it is also the third most deprived local authority in the country. Despite having prioritised equity and social determinants of health, health inequities have widened, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Life expectancy differs by more than 12 years between the most and least deprived wards of the city. We aim to create a strong research partnership whose ultimate objective is to help reduce disparities in health through linking the rich creative heritage within our city to community health. We will build on a community based participatory research model, originally developed to tackle equity and health care quality for Kenyan communities and recently adapted to address inequitable COVID-19 vaccine uptake in Liverpool. Our model has demonstrated that communities are experts in their own health and that community co-researchers can collect, analyse and use data to develop and implement solutions to address local health inequities, monitor their progress and evaluate whether their work is having a positive impact. This work has involved narratives, storyboards and Photovoice but has not yet formally incorporated intervention approaches from culture and the arts, nor explored how to assess the impact of doing this. Our research consortium will be creating new knowledge. We will work with existing Community Innovation Teams and a funded initiative within Liverpool City Council of community champions from minority and disadvantaged communities, linked to grassroots organisations who have developed engagement and outreach work through Liverpool's NHS Primary Care Network. Our focus will initially be on storytelling as an art form that can help disadvantaged communities and people to express, share and validate their lived experiences. Storytelling can be used to collect and make sense of community data, strengthen agency of individuals and groups to take action, communicate disparities to policy makers, provide health messaging and reduce the consequences of inequities through solidarity and inclusion. Storytelling interventions have been successfully used in Liverpool to identify barriers to accessing healthcare, particularly amongst vulnerable or black and ethnic minority populations and used to address for example, living with mental health and chronic health conditions (as a type of social prescribing). We will seek to engage existing networks of creative community assets within Liverpool and extend engagement beyond these to other actors. We will combine evidence of what works with theory to better understand the relationships between arts and culture, community-based research and health inequities. Our "theory of change" will help us understand what is needed to scale-up this work, measure its impact and broaden its reach. Therefore, our initial area of inquiry will be based on both theory and practice for using storytelling in Community Based Participatory Action Research to tackle health inequities. We expect the model of working will be transferable to other cultural or artistic interventions and community assets. The consortium will build on, but also extend, existing collaborations which are best placed to address the research focal areas agreed through participatory processes. Capabilities and cross fertilisation of ideas across these groups will be strengthened allowing the design of robust research designs. At the end of this phase of funding a new research-ready consortium will have been built. Our consortium is all about research "developed by communities for communities" within an ethical framework.

This study will assess the impact on mental health of restricted access to arts and culture in a specific city region, and track, enable and enhance the value of innovation in arts provision in mitigating associated harms. Liverpool has one of the richest concentrations of culture in the UK, boasting the largest clustering of museums and galleries outside London. Cultural capital is critical to the city region's economy, contributing c10% (Culture Liverpool,2019). The city also has a pioneering history of harnessing arts for mental health care through partnerships between culture and health providers. Building on the University of Liverpool's strong alliance with organisations across these sectors, this project brings together an interdisciplinary team of arts and mental health researchers to devise and conduct, in consultation with cultural and health bodies, two surveys. Survey 1 (online interviews) will target 20 arts organisations (10 civic institutions, 10 community arts programmes, representing 'elite' and 'popular' arts) to capture (i)the impact of COVID-19 on public access to arts provision (including those who usually access the arts through formal healthcare routes) and on audience/beneficiary change over time (legacy losses and potential gains) (ii)the success of alternative (e.g. online/digital) modes of provision by arts organisations in reaching and communicating with established and/or new audiences. Survey 2 (online questionnaire and supplementary online/telephone interviews) will target c300 arts' audiences/beneficiaries to capture (i)the impact on mental health of restricted/non-existent access to usual provision (ii)the perceived value and accessibility of alternative arts provision and the latter's impact on mental health/wellbeing.

Although there is a long history of social work and other practitioners involving wider family in trying to resolve difficulties faced by particular family members, the evidence base to support this activity has been relatively weak. Since the early 1990s, a number of developments in law, policy and performance management have had the perhaps unintended consequence of directing agencies and practitioners to focus on specific needs and risks relating to particular individuals, rather than seeing the 'bigger picture' of how family networks actually operate and what might be their potential to provide more effective support or resolve issues for those experiencing difficulties. In more recent years, there has been increasing recognition at government level that this tendency has been counter-productive in terms of delivering services that actually enable people to resolve or manage their difficulties - and has instead resulted in responses that are both costly and can hook people into an unnecessary longer term dependence on a range of public services. However, there has been much less clarity as how best to turn around approaches to service delivery and what might be the best models for delivering services that engage the potential of families and their social networks. Policy initiatives such as 'Think Family' and 'Troubled Families' have fostered the development of new models and ways of working at a local level and in a variety of organisational contexts. From recent research studies and evaluations, we now have some emerging evidence as to 'what works' within specific service contexts - and also what may be barriers to implementing such approaches within existing organisational structures and processes. However, our understanding is far from complete - and what we currently know has not yet been pulled together across different service contexts in a systematic way that can be shared more widely with policy and practice organisations. It is the purpose of this proposal to bring together academic and practice communities to facilitate an interchange of knowledge, ideas and evidence that can be used to drive forward effective and innovatory practice - with different service sectors learning from one another. Maximum impact would be achieved by three linked areas of work: A. Building links within and between organisations to enable a two-way flow that brings in new knowledge and understanding from outside and, in return, gives space for reflection and evaluation of how service innovations are actually working (or not working) as they are applied on the ground. B. A programme of knowledge exchange seminars and more informal workshops that bring together service managers and practitioners from across health, social care and the voluntary sector, with a particular emphasis on building bridges between services in different sectors. C. Development of a protected 'partners' website for informal exchange of information and discussion of ideas in development. This would provide a platform for developing research summaries, descriptions of effective service models, discussion papers and training resources. Once developed, these would then be made publically accessible via the Family Potential Research Centre website for practitioners and managers. Taken together, these three strands of knowledge exchange activity will achieve direct impact on policies and models of service delivery within around thirty participating organisations during the lifetime of the project. Beyond this, it will have wider cross-sector impact through making available the resources that have been developed, so that they can be utilised by other organisations who are facing similar challenges of how to to introduce ways of working that see beyond the individual, and mobilise the potential of wider family relationships in improving and sustaining positive outcomes for family members.

The Future Places Centre will explore how ubiquitous and pervasive technologies, the IoT, and new data science tools can let people reimagine what their future spaces might be. Today, the footprint of such systems extends well beyond the work environments where they first showed themselves and are now, quite literally, ubiquitous. Combined with advances in data science, particularly in the general area of AI, these are enabling entirely new forms of applications and expanding our understanding of how we can shape our physical spaces. The result of these trends is that the potential impact of these systems is no longer confined to work settings or the scientific imagination; it points towards all contexts in which the relationship between space and human practice might be altered through digitally-enabled comprehension of the worlds we inhabit. Such change necessitates enriching the public imagination about what future places might be and how they might be understood. In particular, it points towards new ways of using pervasive technologies (such as the IoT), to shape healthy, sustainable living through the creation of appropriate places. To paraphrase Churchill: if he said we make our buildings, and our buildings come to shape us, the Future Places centre starts from the premise that new understanding of places (enabled by pervasive computing, data science and AI tools), can be combined with a public concern for sustainability and the environment to help shape healthier places and thus make healthier people. It is thus the goal of the centre to reimagine and develop further Mark Weiser's original vision of ubiquitous computing. As it does this so it will cohere Lancaster's pioneering DE projects and create a world-class interdisciplinary research endeavour that binds Lancaster to the local community, to industry and government, making the North West a test-bed for what might be.