Stressed? Sick? Swiss town lets doctors prescribe free museum visits as
art therapy for patients
[March 24, 2025]
By JAMEY KEATEN
NEUCHATEL, Switzerland (AP) — The world’s woes got you down? Feeling
burnout at work? Need a little something extra to fight illness or prep
for surgery? 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 the COVID
crisis also played a role in the program's genesis. “With the closure of
cultural sites (during coronavirus lockdowns), people realized just how
much we need them to feel better.”
She said so far some 500 prescriptions have been distributed to doctors
around town and the program costs “very little." Ten thousand Swiss
francs (about $11,300) have been budgeted for it.
If successful, local officials could expand the program to other
artistic activities like theater or dance, Courcier Delafontaine said.
The Swiss national health care system doesn’t cover “culture as a 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.
She said many types of patients could benefit.
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Marianne de Reynier Nevsky, the cultural mediation manager in
Neuchatel, left, and town council member Julie Courcier Delafontaine
chat about a new "museum prescription" program outside the
Ethnographic Museum of Neuchatel in Neuchatel, Switzerland,
Wednesday, March 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Jamey Keaton)
 “It could be a person with
depression, a person who has trouble walking, a person with a
chronic illness,” she said near a display of a feather headdress
from Papua New Guinea at the Ethnographic Museum of Neuchatel, a
converted former villa that overlooks Late Neuchatel.
Part of the idea is to get recalcitrant patients out of the house
and walking more.
Dr. Marc-Olivier Sauvain, head of surgery at the Neuchatel Hospital
Network, said he had already prescribed museum visits to two
patients to help them get in better shape before a planned
operation.
He said a wider rollout is planned once a control group is set up.
For his practice, the focus will be on patients who admit that
they’ve lost the habit of going out. He wants them to get moving.
“It’s wishful thinking to think that telling them to go walk or go
for a stroll to improve their fitness level before surgery” will
work, Sauvain said on a video call Saturday, wearing blue scrubs. “I
think that these patients will fully benefit from museum
prescriptions. We’ll give them a chance to get physical and
intellectual exercise.”
“And as a doctor, it’s really nice to prescribe museum visits rather
than medicines or tests that patients don’t enjoy,” he added. “To
tell them ’It’s a medical order that instructs you to go visit one
of our nice city museums.'”
Some museum-goers see the upsides too.
“I think it’s a great idea,” said Carla Fragniere Filliger, a poet
and retired teacher, during a visit to the ethnography museum.
“There should be prescriptions for all the museums in the world!”
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