Global Alliance for Arts and Health
The Global Alliance for Arts and Health was a professional organization connecting arts practice with healthcare and community wellbeing. It formed part of the organizational history of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare and later used the name Arts and Health Alliance. The organization disbanded in 2014.
Organization profile
- Organization type
- Medical & professional society
- Headquarters / base
- Washington, DC, United States
- Geographic scope
- United States organization with international professional exchange
- Society for the Arts in Healthcare
- Society of Healthcare Arts Administrators
- Arts and Health Alliance
- Arts & Health Alliance
- Global Alliance for Arts & Health
- Global Alliance for Arts in Health
Medical focus
Activities
Population served
Names and early history
The National Organization for Arts in Health traces the association’s roots to a 1989 gathering of healthcare arts administrators in Durham, North Carolina. Its history records the names Society of Healthcare Arts Administrators, Society for the Arts in Healthcare, Global Alliance for Arts in Health, and Arts and Health Alliance.
A contemporaneous National Endowment for the Arts report from July 2012 describes the Society for the Arts in Healthcare as a Washington, DC nonprofit founded in 1991. The 1989 gathering and the later founding date refer to different stages in the organization’s development. Its work advocated incorporating the arts into healthcare environments and the delivery of care.
Conferences and professional education
Texas Children’s Hospital’s March 2014 announcement identifies the Global Alliance as the organization behind that year’s international arts-and-health conference in Houston. The programme was scheduled for 9–12 April and brought together artistic, clinical, educational and administrative perspectives. The host described sessions around patients, caregivers, community wellbeing, education and healthcare environments.
The announcement also described a pilot examination for artists working in healthcare, developed to explore minimum professional competencies. This was a standards-development activity, not evidence of a medical license or a continuing certification programme today. The conference’s historical website was thesah.org, the domain associated with the Society for the Arts in Healthcare.
Sources: [3].
Closure and later field history
NOAH’s published timeline states that the Arts and Health Alliance disbanded in 2014. It separately dates NOAH’s founding to 2016 and acknowledges the earlier organizations’ contribution to the field. These records support a connection through professional history. They do not establish that the Alliance and NOAH are the same legal organization. Current NOAH activities therefore belong to NOAH rather than to this historical Alliance profile.
Sources: [1].
Further health reading
Dementia is one of the conditions discussed in wider research on music and health. This offers background for the Alliance’s historical arts-and-health field.
Depression provides another clinical context for research on arts, music and wellbeing, subjects connected with the Alliance’s historical professional remit.
Sources
Institutional relationships