Healing Places: Therapeutic Museums Conference

Museums can play a key role in people's mental health, wellbeing and recovery. Open to All training addresses this area, providing people, working in museums and galleries, gain skills, knowledge and understanding to ensure more accessible work places.

You can therefore imagine our excitement when we heard about the Healing Places: Therapeutic Museums' conference put on by The Musuems Association (www.museumsassociation.org).

Myself (Jim Campbell) and Jenny Pope headed down to London last Friday (12th March) for the conference. It was well worth the trip, with great speakers and meeting some really interesting people, all sharing ways of connecting with people to make museums a source of inspiration to help improve people's mental health and wellbeing.

The morning presentations provided projects and case studies on work that is already taking place, including Catherine Chastney talking about the Outreach Programme at the Wallace Collection (London), connecting with people in a Prison, Hostel and Residential Home; Claire Benjamin from the National Musuems Liverpool's project using tools to improve mental health and wellbeing in communities; and Gill Hart from the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) presenting examples of working with people with Alzheimer's and their carers in the 'Beyond Words' project. It was great to hear about so many positive projects.

The afternoon started off with Michael Philips from the Bethlem Royal Hospital providing a inspiring presentation on the History of people who have used mental health services, followed by Caroline Bloore talking about working in Hospitals with children and finishing with an interesting presentation in research on outreach work in hospitals (Guy Noble).

Open to All training had a table set up next to the registration desk, providing information about Open to All, relevant literature (books, reports, leaflets, etc...), background information about Open to All training and leaflets to be handed out.

We met a lot of really interesting people, hearing about a whole range of work going on across the UK and Europe.

We thank everyone who came to talk to us and hear about what we are trying to achieve with Open to All training. A lot of people were inspired by Open to All training. We hope we will work together with them in the future.