(23 Mar 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Neuchatel, Switzerland – 19 March 2025
1. Various of people looking at exhibition in museum
2. SOUNDBITE (French) Julie Courcier Delafontaine, Neuchatel City Council member:
++PART OVERLAID BY SHOT 1++
"Museum orders are prescriptions that are made by doctors, but prescriptions where the patient is sent to visit a museum in our city. There are four museums involved and the idea is to promote health through culture."
3. Mid of Delafontaine talking to town cultural official Marianne de Reynier Nevsky
4. SOUNDBITE (French) Marianne de Reynier Nevsky, Neuchatel cultural official:
++PART OVERLAID BY SHOTS 3 & 5++
“It can be any type of person. It can be a person with depression. It can be a person who has trouble walking. It can be a person with a chronic illness. Culture really does good for a lot of people – and maybe even you.”
5. Close of Nevsky showing “museum prescription” form
6. Various of people looking at exhibition in museum
7. SOUNDBITE (French) Julie Courcier Delafontaine, Neuchatel City Council member:
++PART OVERLAID BY SHOT 6++
"So the idea was based on a 2019 report from the World Health Organization that proved the benefit of art and art therapy, and culture in general on human health."
8. Exterior of Neuchatel Ethnology Museum
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Neuchatel, Switzerland – 22 March 2025
9. SOUNDBITE (French) Dr. Marc-Olivier Sauvain, head of surgery department at Neuchatel Hospital Network:
++VIDEO CALL++
++PART OVERLAID BY SHOTS 8 & 10++
“These patients will greatly benefit from museum prescriptions. We’re going to give them a chance to go out and get physical or intellectual exercise with these museum prescriptions.”
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Neuchatel, Switzerland – 19 March 2025
10. Various views of lake and mountains
STORYLINE:
The Swiss town of Neuchâtel is offering its residents a novel medical option: Expose yourself to art and get a doctor’s note to do it for free.
Under a new two-year pilot project, local and regional authorities are covering the costs of “museum prescriptions” issued by doctors who believe their patients could benefit from visits to any of the town’s four museums as part of their treatment.
The project is based on a 2019 World Health Organization report that found the arts can boost mental health, reduce the impact of trauma and lower the risk of cognitive decline, frailty and “premature mortality,” among other upsides.
Art can help relax the mind — as a sort of preventative medicine — and visits to museums require getting up and out of the house with physical activity like walking and standing for long periods.
Neuchatel council member Julie Courcier Delafontaine said so far, some 500 prescriptions have been distributed to doctors around town, and the program costs very little: 10,000 Swiss francs (about $11,300) have been budgeted for it.
If successful, local officials could expand it to other artistic activities like theater or dance, Courcier Delafontaine said.
The Swiss national health care scheme doesn’t cover “culture as means of therapy,” but she hopes it might one day, if the results are positive enough.
Marianne de Reynier Nevsky, the cultural mediation manager in the town of 46,000 who helped devise the program, said it built on a similar idea rolled out at the Fine Arts Museum in Montreal, Canada, in 2019 – and many types of patients could benefit.
Part of the idea is to get recalcitrant patients out of the house — and walking more.
He said a wider rollout is planned once a control group is set up.
AP Video by Jamey Keaten
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