We are excited to profile our new Medical Humanities in Practice Research Fellows, who are joining us for their first in-person session on Thursday 18 June 2026. First up is David McQuillan, who is a creative health producer, artist and programme manager working across arts, health and communities in West Yorkshire. Here we catch up with David about his plans for the Fellowship and his research project on ‘First songs: Exploring the role of fathers in early years language development through song and storytelling’.
If your research was a film, what would the title be?
I think it would be called Things We Learn Before We Can Speak. A lot of my work is interested in the ways people absorb ideas about care, connection, creativity and identity long before they can formally articulate them; through songs, stories, environments, rituals and relationships.
But I’m equally interested in the fact that this learning isn’t only happening for the child. Whether it’s a parent reading a bedtime story, families singing together, or creative activity within health settings, these are shared cultural experiences that shape everyone involved. The title reflects that sense that some of the most important things we learn about care and belonging happen quietly and often before we fully realise it.
What will you be doing during your Medical Humanities in Practice Research Fellowship?
My fellowship explores the relationship between creativity, care and health, particularly the ways creative activity shapes connection, development, recovery and everyday wellbeing.
The research draws together several strands of my work, including creative health projects within NHS settings, early years music-making, storytelling, and questions around caregiving and representation in children’s literature. I’m especially interested in the cultural stories we inherit about who creates care, who delivers it, and how those ideas shape people’s lives and health outcomes.
A big part of the fellowship will involve connecting practical, community-based work with wider research questions using real projects and lived experiences as a starting point for inquiry rather than separating research from practice.
What expertise and experiences will you be drawing on?
I come to the fellowship primarily from creative and community practice rather than a traditional academic route. Over the past twenty years I’ve worked across arts, health and community settings as an artist, producer and cultural leader, including work within NHS mental health services and creative health programmes across West Yorkshire.
That includes developing projects in inpatient mental health settings, early years programmes, community arts initiatives, and digital creative health work. Alongside this, I’ve continued my own visual arts practice and maintained a long-standing interest in storytelling, participation and the role creativity plays in everyday life.
I think the fellowship offers an opportunity to bring together practical delivery, systems-level thinking and creative inquiry in a way that feels genuinely interdisciplinary.
Why are you excited about working in the medical humanities?
What excites me about medical humanities is the space it creates for questions that don’t fit neatly into a single discipline. Some of the most important aspects of health and care: relationships, stories, identity, culture, creativity, belonging; are often difficult to measure, but deeply influential in people’s lives.
Much of my work has involved seeing the impact creative activity can have in real-world settings, whether that’s on a mental health ward, in a library session with families, or through community participation. Medical humanities feels like a place where those experiences can be explored seriously and critically, while still leaving room for curiosity, ambiguity and imagination.
I’m particularly interested in how everyday cultural experiences – songs, stories, drawing, reading and rituals – can shape our understanding of care, wellbeing and human connection.
What changes would you like to see as a result of your research?
I’d like to see creativity taken more seriously as part of everyday health and wellbeing, rather than something viewed as separate from “real” care or only accessible to certain groups of people.
I also hope the research contributes to wider conversations about representation, caregiving and participation, particularly around who feels culturally included within creative and caring spaces, and who may feel absent from them.
More broadly, I’d like the work to help strengthen the connection between research, community practice and health systems, showing that creative activity is not simply an extra, but something that can meaningfully shape environments, relationships and outcomes.
What interests or hobbies do you have outside of your research that might surprise people?
Most of my hobbies are creative, for example I’m trying to teach myself how to play piano, so are not that surprising – but I recently went snorkelling for the first time with my little boy and that has become a bit of an obsession!
We warmly welcome David to the Discovery Research Platform and look forward to working with him.
Continue reading our interview series with our 2026-27 cohort of In Practice Research Fellows:
- An interview with Fouziya Asim
- An interview with Kate Quinn
- An interview with Sam Slatcher
- An interview with Sophie-Jo Peel
- An interview with Maddie Rose-Carbone
Find out more:
- Read the announcement of this year’s In Practice Research Fellows
- Find out more about the 2025-26 cohort of In Practice Research Fellows
- Celebrate our 2025-26 cohort as we hear from them at an event on 19 June 2026
