The ENO are delighted to announce that ENO Breathe and the team behind it are being recognised with an inaugural American Academy of Teachers of Singing (AATS) award for COVID-19 Response (2021).

The AATS awards were created to recognise, honour, and nurture outstanding accomplishments in the teaching of singing and in allied professions. This award has been bestowed onENO Breathe ‘for creating innovative and compassionate effort between the arts and medicine to help relieve the suffering of individuals experiencing long-term post-COVID respiratory and anxiety problems.’

ENO Breathe is a breathing and well-being programme developed specifically for people recovering from COVID-19, who are still suffering from breathlessness and associated anxiety. The aim of the programme is to empower and equip patients with the tools they need for self-management with their recovery.  It is a social prescribing (non-clinical) intervention that uses singing techniques to aid recovery from COVID-19. Delivered by the ENO in collaboration with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust entirely online, the programme focuses on breathing retraining through singing. No prior singing experience is required in order to take part in ENO Breathe.

Academy member Margaret Baroody says: ‘This extraordinary effort by the English National Opera in conjunction with the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust deserves recognition because of the creative and compassionate development of a program utilising the collaboration of arts and medicine to the relief of human suffering. This exceptional program, which, because of a successful trial is being expanded and offered for free to those referred by a physician, was developed in a time of societal crisis and upheaval affecting the physical and economic health of a nation as well as the world. This effort represents the ability of the human spirit to meet and overcome the worst of challenges and demonstrates the potential power of the arts in the physical and emotional healing of disease.’

Congratulations to all those involved with ENO Breathe.