Mark Fisher wins Manchester Culture award!

We are so proud to announce that Mark Fisher, Co-Director of SMUK and Specialist Health Musician was a very well-deserving winner in the Manchester Culture Awards 2021 in the category for Creative Care in COVID (Individual) and a finalist in a second award category; Promotion of Health & Wellbeing for his beautiful therapeutic composition work during the pandemic.

Due to COVID-19, in March 2020, all music programmes at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital were put on hold, including a long-standing music project; Sound Environments in Paediatric Critical Care at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital that Mark leads alongside his partner, Dr Ros Hawley. Mark has lived experience of long-term hospitalisation and was acutely aware of the isolation that would be felt by families and staff in hospitals during the pandemic. He worked tirelessly to adapt his musical practice on to live digital platforms and compose a rich resource of soothing and therapeutic music for the staff and families in Critical Care to share and access online on Songbirds Music UK’s soundcloud platform.

Then in June 2020, as a result of a collaboration with Cardmedic™ a newly designed flashcard communication system which enables medical staff to communicate more effectively with patients whilst wearing PPE to improve COVID-19 patients' experience of hospitalisation, they included a therapeutic music listening option for patients, featuring four of Mark's compositions on their app. Cardmedic™ and Mark’s soothing, therapeutic compositions are now used to help frontline staff and patients in hospitals/healthcare settings across 120+ countries around the world.