Cultural Initiatives in Public Hospitals: Situated Forms of Health Promotion in Argentina

Cultural initiatives in public hospitals represent an underexamined form of health promotion in Latin America. This study examines how these initiatives are organized, implemented, and sustained in public hospitals in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina). We use the term cultural initiatives to describe hospital-based programs and practices that mobilize artistic, heritage, and community resources; cultural managers are the actors who coordinate and sustain them within hospital structures. The qualitative, exploratory study was conducted between 2020 and 2022 and combined an online questionnaire completed across 18 hospitals with 25 semi-structured interviews. Manual thematic content analysis identified three interconnected dimensions: actors, settings, and institutional challenges. Cultural managers drew on hybrid occupational trajectories and institutional knowledge to connect clinical, cultural, and community actors. The initiatives transformed hospital spaces and created opportunities for expression, participation, and social connection, yet their continuity was constrained by fragmented roles, limited resources, scarce dedicated space, and weak formal recognition. These findings show that the health-promoting potential of cultural initiatives depends on the institutional work and organizational conditions that sustain them. By documenting the conditions under which cultural initiatives emerge and are sustained, this study contributes to international evidence on arts-based health promotion and highlights the need for dedicated roles, intersectoral partnerships, and the formal recognition of cultural action as a core component of equitable, community-centered care.