Events and opportunities

Join us at an upcoming event, or take the chance to engage with the opportunities advertised below.

Events

Creative Arts and Health Forum

Date: Friday, 29 May 2026, 13:00- 18:30

Location: Performance Space (ALG10), College Building, St John’s Street

This is a research sharing and networking event, jointly curated by the School of Communication and Creativity (SCC) and the School of Health and Medical Sciences (SHMS). The focus is interdisciplinary research initiatives in Creative Health, within the University and outside, across community and clinical contexts, including contribution to impact and public engagement.

Programme and register to attend

Exhibition: Between Feeling and Unfeeling: Art and Anaesthesia at the Anaesthesia Museum, London

Date: Open until April 2028

Location: Museum of Anaesthesia, 21 Portland Place

Prof. Deborah Padfield has photographs and a film in this exhibition which brings together historical and contemporary works. It explores the relationship between anaesthesia, art and the experience of pain.

The Inaugural Musical Care International Network Conference

Date: Wednesday afternoon, 9th June until Friday afternoon, 11th June 2027

Location: Online, and in person at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, Scotland

Musical care is broadly defined as “the role of music—music listening as well as music-making—in supporting any aspect of people’s developmental or health needs”.This conference will be a vital opportunity for practitioners, researchers, those with lived experience and policymakers from diverse fields and practices (including music psychology, music therapy, ethnomusicology, music education, and more) to gather and collaborate. Reflecting the network’s core values of cultural humility, open interdisciplinarity, diversity, and ethical practice, the event is designed to build opportunities for collaboration across disciplines and cultures to advance musical care research and practice globally. A call for papers and registration details coming soon.

More information

Opportunities

PAIN CARDS (opportunity to pilot for free)

Inviting all clinicians. We have developed a set of images or PAIN CARDS (co-created by an artist, Deborah Padfield with NHS chronic pain patients) as a communication and assessment tool. In collaboration with UCL, we are offering a free set of PAIN CARDS to the first fifty clinicians who sign up to pilot them in exchange for completing a short survey.

Please complete the form. The first 50 clinicians who sign up will be given a free set.

Supporting research: See this newly published paper in IASP journal PAIN advocating for the use of art and images in healthcare and in pain medicine in particular.

TeachMedHums Network

Purpose: to network academics who deliver medical humanities teaching, broadly defined, as part of core curriculum and/or intercalated teaching in UK medical schools.

Open to join now - all welcome.

Please email Dr Richard Bellis at rtb8@st-andrews.ac.uk: or to link directly to the mailing list please sign up via Jiscmail | TeachMedHums

Medhums BMJ new call for papers

Medicine, Meaning and Metaphor: Arts and Humanities as essential partners in medical and healthcare training

This special issue will examine the way training in arts and humanities can interrogate and illuminate the role of meaning in clinical encounters and the experience of illness. It will showcase ways in which methodologies from the arts and humanities can help healthcare students understand and navigate the relationships between bodies, health, illness, death, community, culture and self, asking what does it mean to be and to have a body and what happens when minds and bodies fail? These complex questions play a fundamental role in the practice of healthcare, are core to the humanities, visual and performing arts but are not yet mandatory in UG or PG medical training.

The collection brings together materials which unpick the diversity and importance of ‘meaning’ to healthcare professionals and patients. It provides concrete and inspirational examples of cutting-edge arts, humanities and transdisciplinary practices, across the globe, that can contribute to clinical training and argue for further arts and humanities teaching in medical schools and post graduate education for doctors and healthcare professionals.

Submission Deadline: 27 October 2026

Submit your paper: Topic Collection: Medicine, Meaning and Metaphor | Medical Humanities

Musical Care International Network

This network of practitioners and researchers working on musical care throughout the life course emphasises international and interdisciplinary collaboration. We include practitioners and researchers from a broad range of disciplines and practices, including but not limited to community music, ethnomusicology, medical humanities, medicine, music anthropology, music in health, music education, music psychology, music sociology, and music therapy.

Join the network for Free and join our events here: Musical Care International Network – Musical Care Research

Music and Parental Wellbeing Alliance

The Music and Parental Wellbeing Alliance aims to enable, sustain, and expand an international and interdisciplinary community that works towards ensuring that all parents have the opportunity – and are empowered and equipped – to engage with music that can support their wellbeing.

Our vision and mission is set out in our freely-available position paper in Music & Science. The Alliance is co-founded and co-chaired by Professor Rosie Perkins (Royal College of Music, London) and Dr Katie Rose Sanfilippo (City St George’s, University of London).