I was invited to speak at the University of Manchester’s Creative Health Research Symposium on 27 June 2024. Reading through my notes on the morning of the symposium – about recent research and gaps in the evidence – I decided to end with a short plea to creative health research commissioners:
- Take research seriously as a tool for informing practice and policy
- Treat researchers fairly, pay us properly and promptly, with advance notice of how much we will be paid
- Give us credit for our research – our livelihood and self esteem depends on this
Research is a vital part of the creative health ecology and deserves to be treated as such.