A new publication by our Moving Bodies Lab researcher, Emily Davis, explores professional perspectives on Scottish Ballet’s developing ‘dance on prescription’ model.
Emily’s qualitative research article features in BMC Primary Care as part of their Special Issue on Social Prescribing. Titled ‘Cross-sector perspectives on the role of a UK national cultural asset in social prescribing: a qualitative study,’ the article explores how professionals across health, culture, and third sectors experience, perceive, and understand the role of Scottish Ballet in social prescribing.
By bringing together professional perspectives across sectors, Emily’s findings offer insight into both the opportunities and challenges of bridging cultural provisions with mainstream health and social care, specifically through Scottish Ballet’s developing ‘dance on prescription’ model.
Scottish Ballet’s dance provisions for neurological conditions were generally positively perceived and prescribed by certain secondary care professionals, offering an additional means for health providers to support patient well-being in their local communities. Some also noted particular opportunities to improve support for patients with more specialised needs and reduced mobility. In turn, professionals identified the potential of these dance provisions in supporting the more person-centred, community-based model of care encouraged by social prescribing.
That said, there were also complexities related to wider adoption and integration of dance provisions among health professionals and services, which were still often viewed as a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘need to have’, especially in the current pressurised healthcare landscape. On the cultural side, there were also potential risks for Scottish Ballet in too closely aligning with health standards and services, which at times were at odds with their more creative, flexible, and innovative ethos.
Overall, these findings identified a need for further collaborative, cross-sector models that reduce reliance on any single sector and encourage more integrated, community-centred, and sustainable social prescribing.
If you’re interested in finding out more, Emily’s paper is available open access under Wellcome’s policy and can be read in full here:
Davis, E. (2026). Cross-sector perspectives on the role of a UK national cultural asset in social prescribing: a qualitative study. BMC Primary Care, 27(1), 46. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12875-025-03156-7
