The Liceu and the Catalan Institute of Health (ICS) are launching “Liceu i Salut”, a pilot project that integrates cultural participation into primary care centres (CAP) in Ciutat Vella to promote emotional well-being and combat social isolation. The initiative combines sessions in primary care centres with activities at the Liceu, highlighting the potential of music and the arts as a tool for community health and social cohesion.
The Catalan Institute of Health (ICS) and the Gran Teatre del Liceu jointly promote the pilot project “Liceu i Salut”, an initiative that integrates cultural participation into group activities in primary care centres (CAP), with the aim of promoting emotional well-being and reducing social isolation.
The programme is aimed at adults experiencing non-diagnosed emotional distress, low social networks and disconnection from community resources, referred from the Doctor Lluís Sayé, Casc Antic and Gòtic primary care centres in the Ciutat Vella district of Barcelona. Participants take part in groups of 10 to 12 people led by community emotional well-being referents (RBEC) from these centres and by educators and professionals from the Liceu.
Jose Antonio Losada, Nursing Manager at the Primary Care and Community Management Team Barcelona Litoral-Esquerra of the ICS, explains that “from primary care consultations we propose that people with some type of non-medicalised emotional distress take part in group activities where we add the participation of the Liceu, which acts as a community resource, bringing the potential of arts and culture into clinical care to support emotional well-being”.
Each participating CAP maintains its usual emotional well-being group sessions, and the Liceu contributes three additional sessions. The first takes place at the CAP, focusing on operatic discovery and how music can influence people’s well-being. The chosen large-scale production is La torre dels somnis, with music by Puccini, combining opera, circus and poetry. The second session takes place at the Liceu with a workshop that continues the first session and includes a guided visit to its different spaces. In the third session, also at the theatre, participants attend a rehearsal of the selected production and later take part in a collective reflection space.
“For me it has been a wonderful project. Music can guide you back to a state of calm, peace and tranquillity, even when you are not feeling well. You can feel nostalgia, pain, anger or anxiety, stress, pain… music calms you and everything around you”, says Maura Josselin Sánchez Quevedo, a participant in the project.
The project includes a quantitative and qualitative evaluation system to analyse the impact of the activities on participants’ emotional well-being, social support and community connection, thereby contributing to the generation of evidence and methodologies applicable to future similar initiatives in other cultural institutions and community settings.
“This project is part of the ICS Arts in Health strategy, which works with an intervention methodology based on using the power of arts and culture to improve people’s health and well-being”, says Losada.
Expected impacts include improved emotional and social well-being, reduced unwanted loneliness, increased cultural participation and the creation of new community dynamics. It also aims to open the Liceu to the neighbourhood and present it as a space for meeting, expression and community participation that can complement approaches to health improvement and prevention.
The initiative is the result of a collaboration agreement between the Catalan Institute of Health and the Liceu, and is one of the first joint initiatives in the field of community health and culture. It is framed within arts-in-health strategies and community health and cultural prescription activities promoted in primary care.