It’s a Missing Economy.
Across policy, health, and cultural conversations, “creative health” is increasingly referenced as a feel-good adjunct — a small program, a pilot, a grant round, a line item tucked into wellbeing strategies. Yet globally, the numbers tell a very different story. The Global Wellness Institute estimates the global wellness economy at over USD $6.3 trillion, growing faster than GDP in most developed economies. Within that, prevention-based health models — including mental wellbeing, social connection, community participation, and non-clinical interventions — represent one of the fastest-expanding segments. What remains almost entirely unmeasured is the economic value of the workforce enabling those outcomes, particularly women whose labour sits at the intersection of care, creativity, and health.
The dominant narrative suggests that creative work connected to health is inherently small-scale: personal, therapeutic, informal, and best supported through short-term grants. In this framing, creative activity is treated as discretionary rather than productive, and women’s participation is seen as lifestyle-driven rather than economically strategic. As a result, creative health remains marginal — funded episodically, evaluated poorly, and disconnected from workforce planning, productivity metrics, or preventative health investment.
This narrative persists despite clear evidence that women already underpin this economy. Women perform over 76% of unpaid labour and 71.8% of primary care in Australia, absorbing costs that would otherwise sit within formal health, disability, and social systems. At the same time, women make up the majority of the creative labour base, yet operate almost entirely without recognised workforce architecture — no certification, no provenance systems, no scalable pathways that accommodate caregiving alongside skilled production. The result is not a lack of creativity or demand, but a structural failure that suppresses economic contribution and shifts costs elsewhere.
The Creative Women’s Association approaches this from a different lens. Rather than asking how creativity can be funded, it asks how creative labour becomes legible economic infrastructure. Internationally proven models already exist. The Harris Tweed Authority does not treat weaving as art for exhibition; it treats it as a protected trade. Its producers work from home, within family systems, across generations, with rigorous standards, inspection, and provenance. That structure has sustained regional economies for over a century while preserving quality, identity, and export value. Crucially, it accommodates caregiving rather than competing with it.
Applied to creative health, this reframes the opportunity entirely. When women are able to sustain both skilled creative production and caregiving roles — rather than being forced to choose — workforce participation increases, attrition decreases, and productivity stabilises. The Domestic & Care Load Index explains why current systems fail: unpaid labour, care intensity, mental load, physiological stress, and financial precarity compound rather than add. Without infrastructure designed around this reality, women exit at peak skill maturity, and the economy loses value twice — once through lost production, and again through increased health and social expenditure.
Economic modelling set out in the Creative Women’s Association’s national policy proposal shows that Australia is already losing billions of dollars annually through creative underemployment, early workforce exit, and suppressed earnings among women. Conservative estimates place the loss from creative underemployment alone at $1.2–$1.5 billion per year, with broader gendered productivity losses exceeding $6 billion annually. These are not abstract figures. They represent unrealised prevention capacity, increased pressure on mental health services, and a failure to translate skilled labour into stable economic contribution.
If creative health were treated as infrastructure rather than charity, the economic picture shifts rapidly. Even a modest formalisation of this workforce — through certification, standards, and provenance — would allow creative health trades to integrate into procurement, primary health networks, education systems, and regional development strategies. Using Global Wellness Institute growth trajectories, allocating just 1–2% of Australia’s health and wellness economy to structured creative health labour would represent a multi-billion-dollar sector, with downstream savings in population health, disability support, and crisis services.
This is the reframe that matters. Creative health is not a “nice-to-have” cultural layer. It is a missing economic engine, currently subsidised by women’s unpaid labour and constrained by the absence of workforce infrastructure. Small grants do not build economies. Standards do. Provenance does. Oversight does. When labour is recognised, it scales; when it is not, it leaks value.
The time has come to stop asking whether creative health works — the evidence already shows it does — and start building the systems that allow it to function at economic scale. Not as performance. Not as therapy. But as skilled trade, integrated into the nation’s preventative health and productivity architecture. When that shift occurs, the returns will not only be cultural or social. They will be measurable, fiscal, and generational.
Read the Full Article:
The Global Wellness Economy: A Framework for Prevention-Based Growth — Global Wellness Institute
.
Designed with WordPress