BRIT Trust Diaries: CEO Claire Cordeaux on how BAPAM supports wellbeing among musicians and artists

BAPAM CEO Claire Cordeaux shares a new impact report that highlights how the UK’s medical charity for the performing arts supports musicians’ and artists’ wellbeing. She also explains how BRIT Trust funding will enable a series of free workshops for performing artists working in creative health settings.

BAPAM is the UK’s medical charity for the performing arts.

The UK Government and the NHS’s 10-year health plan places creative health at the heart of preventive care to reduce ill health and inequality. For a growing number of professional musicians and performing artists, that means an important and rewarding element of their career, alongside other creative work, is facilitating programmes in settings such as hospitals, care homes, prisons, detention centres, and community groups, to enable participation in creative activity.

Artists bring an inclusive and person-centred approach to health initiatives. They care deeply about the communities they work with and often work with people with whom they share lived experience, including of intersectional challenges such as inequality, migration, incarceration, disability, neurodivergence, discrimination and marginalisation.

This work comes with its own challenges and can be emotionally and mentally demanding, impacting artists’ own health and wellbeing. However, the provision and accessibility of structured support for the artists who facilitate creative health initiatives varies widely.

BAPAM’s support for musicians’ and artists’ wellbeing combines preventing health problems by sharing knowledge through our training workshop programme, with offering timely access to free, expert medical advice when it is needed.

Funded by the BRIT Trust, through 2026, BAPAM is running a series of free workshops for performing artists working in creative health settings. Through this initiative, musicians can access practical and empathetic support to ensure that they can deliver their work and support others, with the knowledge to protect their own health and wellbeing.

Each session is facilitated by a healthcare professional with expertise in both health and performance settings. Dr Amal Lad is a GP and musician, and a member of the Royal College of GPs’ Creative Health Special Interest Group. Heather Turkington is a Dramatherapist specialising in trauma who has worked with people affected by the Northern Ireland conflict. Dena Oxley is a counsellor who has worked as the Clinical Lead for the Britten Pears Arts Prison Project.

Our next workshop series starts in June, and you can find out more and sign up for free here: Healthy Practice Training | BAPAM

Professional musicians and performing artists are adding creative health jobs to a working life that also includes rehearsing, touring, recording, producing, teaching, composing, pitching, content creation, promotion, and taking care of all the admin of freelance work. The picture is of hard pressed, gig economy workers in sometimes precarious conditions, who need specialist support to maintain their own good health. 75% of people working in the performing arts will experience a career impacting physical or mental health condition.

At the heart of BAPAM’s work is patient-centred care – expert support delivered by medical professionals who understand what it takes to build a creative career and who take the time to listen to individuals and work with them to address their unique needs.

Our new Impact Report highlights the sector-wide challenge, but also the ways in which musicians’ and performance professionals’ health needs can be successfully met. Crucially, it shows the impact that can be made when the sector comes together to build systemic support. We are delighted to be working with The BRIT Trust and our partners across the music and creative industries, using our medical expertise to support excellent initiatives in health and wellbeing. As a sector which is making a real difference to the health and wellbeing of others through our creative work, we need to work together to look after the health of our musicians and creative practitioners.

You can read BAPAM’s Impact Report here: BAPAM Impact Report

To learn more about the work of BAPAM, visit https://www.bapam.org.uk/