Kerry Wilson joined colleagues from Live Music Now and the NHS Women’s Health and Maternity Partnership to run a workshop on the Lullaby project at the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance (CHWA) conference in Barnsley in October 2023.
It was a pleasure to join Karen Irwin, Strategic Director (Children and Young People), Live Music Now and Jo Ward, Strategic Consultant at the NHS Women’s Health and Maternity partnership for Cheshire and Merseyside (WHaM) last week at the CHWA conference, to run a breakout workshop on LMN’s Lullaby project. Pioneered by Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute in New York, Lullaby brings together women and families with professional musicians to co-create original lullabies for their babies, in support of women’s maternal health and early child development. It has been adapted and developed internationally by a range of cultural organisations working in partnership with health and social care services.
Live Music Now is one such organisation, positioning this inspiring project on the frontline of women’s perinatal health care and embedding Lullaby within community support systems across the North West of England and beyond. Workshop participants were welcomed to the session with the soothing sounds of lullabies created by women and LMN musicians as part of a pilot project delivered in 2021-22, with the support of the NHS WHaM programme.
Karen then explained the development of LMN’s Lullaby project (workshop slides available here) and how it works in practice as a truly collaborative endeavour between participating women, who are usually referred to the project after experiencing perinatal mental health problems, and LMN professional musicians. The process involves them working together to compose melodies and lyrics, which may begin for example with a letter written for babies about Mum’s future hopes and dreams for them. Original lullabies are then professionally recorded as a keepsake for families and performed publicly in celebration events at community or cultural venues.
I have had the great honour of working with LMN since early 2021 to develop an evaluation framework for the project, and joined Karen and Jo to share our evaluation approach and headline findings. In keeping with the collaborative spirit of Lullaby, the evaluation framework was developed in consultation with an advisory stakeholder group, and considers the impact of the project on women’s subjective wellbeing, self-efficacy and agency; musicians’ professional development and work-based wellbeing; the added value created for local health and social care ecosystems; and recommendations for the expansion and sustainability of the project.
Jo provided crucial context for the development of Lullaby on behalf of the commissioning NHS service, including the current crisis in women’s health care and maternity services more specifically, referencing for example the MBRRACE-UK report, which found that 229 women died during pregnancy or up to six weeks after in 2018-20, a 19% increase on previous years. Women living in the most deprived areas were more than twice as likely to die as those in the most affluent parts of the UK. Jo is a passionate advocate for creativity as a preventative measure in women’s health, and co-authored the National Women and Children’s Creative Health Handbook.
Workshop participants included regional representatives of the National Centre for Creative Health, along with managers of arts and health programmes in hospitals and museum and gallery services. We had an inspiring and motivating discussion on the need for more high quality creative interventions in maternity services and associated social care provision, with Lullaby as a potential flagship approach.