On 5 December 2024, Holding Time was honoured with the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) Health & Wellbeing Award in the Arts & Health category. Recognised for its innovative approach to tackling the cultural and structural barriers to breastfeeding, Holding Time’s touring hospital exhibition combined art, photography, and mothers’ voices to spark vital conversations about maternal wellbeing and infant feeding stigma.
Delivered in partnership with Improving Me – NHS Cheshire & Merseyside, the exhibition marked the NHS 75th anniversary and launched Baby Week 2024, with events at Liverpool University Hospital and Aintree Hospital. The award reflects the project’s growing impact across the UK—demonstrating the power of creative health interventions to support mothers, build communities, and improve population health.
The RSPH Health and Wellbeing Award is the UK’s premier awards scheme for promoting health and wellbeing, celebrating activities, policies and strategies that empower communities and individuals, that improve population health and address the wider social determinants of health. The award reflects the importance of on-going collaborations between over 19 NHS organisations concerned to harness and share the value of creative health interventions for health and wellbeing, by amplifying prevention activity and health promotion as well as providing new treatment and management opportunity.
This Holding Time exhibition was delivered in partnership with the Healing Arts Team at Liverpool University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. It marked both the NHS 75 whilst providing a launch event for the annual Cheshire and Merseyside Baby Week programme. The NHS 75 provided a high-profile platform for an exciting creative programme marking 75 years of the NHS. This first Holding Time exhibition (phase 1) has now moved to Aintree Hospital and has been expanded to include new portraits. Holding Time phase 2 now sits alongside two new Improving Me exhibitions entitled , I See You, which explore the importance of identity and representation in women’s health.
From left: Rachel New, Writing Lead, Jo Ward, Improving Me and Lisa Creagh, Artist outside Liverpool Foundation Hospital for the launch of the Holding Time Tour
