SBRG

Between 8th – 12th June 2026 we headed up to Edinburgh for the Arts Health Research Intensive. This is our flagship week-long immersive course to develop knowledge, skills and contacts in arts and health research. A huge thank you to our 2026 cohort for making this such a brilliant week! The course is a partnership with the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Arts and Health at UCL…

Social prescribing, which connects people to arts and exercise activities and other sources of support, may help adolescents waiting for specialist mental health services, suggests a new study led by our Research Group. Wellbeing While Waiting, the results of which have been published in the journal European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, involved over 550 adolescents aged 11 to 18 who had been r…

Regularly taking part in arts activities such as reading, listening to music or visiting a gallery or museum may slow the pace of biological ageing, suggests a new study from our team. The paper, published in the journal Innovation in Aging, looked at survey response and blood test data from 3,556 adults in the UK. Researchers compared participants’ arts and cultural engagement with chemical chan…

Head of our Research Group Professor Daisy Fancourt has been named as the Royal Albert Hall’s first ever Associate Scientist. In this role Fancourt will contribute to a programme of events and initiatives linking the arts with science, building on her work showing how arts engagement impacts health. “It is an honour to be the inaugural Associate Scientist for the Royal Albert Hall, a venue I have…

Why This Matters Social prescribing has the potential to significantly improve wellbeing and quality of life for autistic people by connecting them to meaningful activities and community support. However, autistic people currently face substantial barriers in accessing and benefiting from social prescribing at every stage of the pathway. Poorly matched or rushed social prescribing can worsen anxi…

It’s been a while since our last SBB Spotlight, a feature where we chat to our team members about their projects and interests, including those outside of work, and find out how they got to where they are. In this edition, meet Dr Robert Booth, Research Fellow and Trial Manager within the group. He’s currently working on two national trials exploring youth social prescribing as a community-based …

In celebration of Social Prescribing Day we’re bringing together highlights from the team’s last year of work on the topic of social prescribing. This includes our activities as the National Centre for Social Prescribing Data and Analysis as well as hosts of the Social Prescribing Youth Network. Read on to learn about landmark pieces of research, free resources for practitioners and opportunities…

Join us online on Monday, 20th April, 12 – 1pm BST to connect with other network members and hear about SPYN’s latest learnings and future plans. The Social Prescribing Youth Network (SPYN) is a free network for anyone interested in social prescribing for children, young people and families. In our next Member Meetup we’ll be holding space for members to share their experiences, questions and ide…

Daisy Fancourt, Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology and Head of the Social Biobehavioural Research Group at UCL, has been announced as the new UNESCO Chair in Arts and Global Health. A UNESCO Chair is a team led by a higher education or research institution that partne Professor Daisy Fancourt named as new UNESCO Chair, advancing knowledge and practice in Arts and Global Health This new d…

About the webinar Join us for an exciting webinar presenting the latest research from our project at University College London, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh: WE-EngAGE. Across two years, we’ve explored how leisure activities shape mental, physical, and cognitive wellbeing in later life, and what the barriers and enablers that influence participation are. The webinar will show…

In February 2026 we held our Youth Social Prescribing Symposium at London’s Southbank Centre, bringing together 40 attendees in the room and more than 150 people online to discuss latest research, policy and practice in the field. This was the culmination of our last year of work with the Social Prescribing Youth Network (SPYN) and as part of the event we launched two new free resources together …