Arts in Medicine – Arts Prescribing

Arts Prescribing

Social Prescribing

Social Prescribing connects patients to community-based supports that improve health and quality of life. As the nation’s largest municipal health care system, NYC Health + Hospitals integrates Social Prescribing across care delivery and coordination. Social workers, peer counselors, care coordinators, case managers, and community healthcare workers link patients to food and nutrition, financial assistance, and housing support.

Arts in Medicine connects patients to free and low-cost arts and cultural programs through Arts Prescribing, a system-wide approach to social prescribing rooted in the arts.

Arts Prescribing

Arts Prescribing links patients to arts and cultural resources in their communities to reduce social isolation, improve physical and mental health outcomes, continuity of care, and access to safety net resources. A first guided experience lowers barriers that keep people away, cost, unfamiliarity, and social stigma. Sustained and equitable cultural participation that enhances the clinical care patients receive at the hospital is the outcome we are building toward.

Our strategy runs through two programs:

• Arts Connect: facilitated cultural engagements built into patient care.
• Arts Help: referrals connecting patients to arts and cultural programs in their communities.

Arts Connect

Arts Connect brings patients into the cultural life of the city through experiences designed with clinical teams, including our Licensed Creative Arts Therapists, across outpatient behavioral health, addiction treatment, and hospital violence interruption programs.

Museums for Recovery. Patients at Jacobi’s Comprehensive Addiction Treatment Center take part in a year-long series of guided museum and gallery visits, each built as a primer session, a visit, and a debrief. The current series is a partnership with NALA Projects. Patients have visited the Guggenheim Museum, the Frick Collection, Hauser and Wirth, and the Museum of the City of New York.

HHart of Medicine for Patients. Arts in Medicine is extending its staff-facing art observation program to patients. Building on our Curating for Health model, sessions center on works co-curated by staff and patients in the clinical environment, offering close looking, reflection, and creative expression as part of care.

Arts and Violence Interruption. In the summer of 2026, Arts in Medicine connected young people from Stand Up to Violence, the Hospital Violence Intervention Program at NYC Health + Hospitals/Jacobi, with Carnegie Hall’s Future Music Project. Traditionally serving young people impacted by the justice system, Future Music Project expanded its reach into the community through this special summer opportunity. Participants explored foundational musical concepts and creative expression while gaining unique access to the artistic and professional world of music. The experience included attending an orchestra rehearsal at Carnegie Hall, participating in a guided tour of the Hall, and attending a live concert. Young people also engaged with professionals from across both the commercial and nonprofit music sectors, learning about a range of career pathways in the music industry and the skills, education, and experiences that can support those journeys.

Arts Help

Arts in Medicine is building Arts Help, a referral pathway that will give clinicians direct access to arts and cultural programs for their patients, alongside the social supports they already refer to. Arts in Medicine is developing this work with clinical and operational partners across the health system.

For cultural partners. To join the Arts Help network, programs must be low-cost or free, accessible by transit, multilingual where possible, able to demonstrate impact on social connectedness and quality of life, and ideally co-located with other social services. Reach out at ArtsinMedicine@nychhc.org.

Building Toward City and State Policy

Arts in Medicine sits on the design team of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Making Missing Markets initiative and co-leads the New York City and New York State Arts and Health Policy Task Force, developing the referral pathways, financing, and workforce infrastructure a durable arts prescribing system requires. As the largest public health system in the country, NYC Health + Hospitals is where these questions get tested at scale.

Coming this fall: our Arts and Cultural Asset Map Report.