Cardiff University and The Fathom Trust have formed a partnership to promote natural crafting activities as a means to improve wellbeing for people living with mental health difficulties.
Entitled ‘Making Well: Health and Healing Through Green Crafts’ the collaboration was funded by the Accelerate Wales Innovation programme.
Working alongside academics at Bangor and Cardiff universities, Fathom Trust’s founder Dr Will Beharrell has co-produced a programme conducted by local crafters and artisans which is designed to “promote mental health recovery, emotional resilience and improved wellbeing”.
It is accessed through ‘Green Prescribing’ by local GPs, community mental health teams and the charity Mind.
As part of the Accelerate project, health economists from Bangor University investigated the social return on investment of the Making Well project, and Dr Lucy Sheehan from Cardiff University conducted an ethnographic exploration. Reports on the project can be found here.
Concluding the project, Fathom Trust held an event to present findings, through which focus groups explored the opportunities and challenges of Green Prescribing along with possible future directions for non-medical mental wellbeing therapies.
Professor Phil Kloer, Deputy Chief Executive and Executive Medical Director at Hywel Dda University Health Board, said of the event: “I met all sorts of wonderful people with perspectives and skills very different from my own, which reminded me that health has many dimensions and requires many different types of attention. As a physician, medical director and deputy chief executive in the NHS, it is exciting to see this vital insight at the heart of Fathom’s work and at the heart of our common task of creating health and wellbeing and preventing illness.”
