Chair of National Centre for Creative Health stands down

Lord ALAN HOWARTH has stood down as founding Chair of the National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) to become honourary President of the organisation.

Lord Howarth served as an MP from 1983 to 2005, first as a Conservative before defecting to Labour. He was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Arts between 1998 and 2001 and became a Labour life peer as Baron Howarth of Newport in 2005.

He formed the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing in 2014 and chaired a national inquiry between 2015 and 2017.

The inquiry resulted in the report Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing, whose recommendations led to the establishment of the NCCH as a charity in 2020 and the organisation's public launch in March 2021.

NCCH’s new Chair is Professor MARTIN MARSHALL, a former Chair of the Royal College of GPs and current Chair of the Nuffield Trust.

“Martin will bring extremely valuable knowledge and strategic insight into the current health context as the organisation pursues its ambition to see creative health embedded in systems,” Howarth said.

“We are very pleased that Martin has agreed to take up this position as we look towards the future of the organisation and what we can achieve over the next decade in establishing creative health as an integral part of a 21st-century health and care system, one which is holistic and person-centred.”