This article explores some of the issues raised in recent literature about the manner in which music therapy has been developing. It focuses on the professional rather than the clinical issues that surround its development and explores concerns about and criticisms of the manner in which the profession in the UK has sought to develop. Thus it focuses on the political implications of the professionalisation of music therapy in the UK. Many of the issues have arisen as a result of the evolution of Community Music Therapy, challenging music therapists regardless of the clinical approaches employed. This article considers whether the profession's self-promotional activities are compatible with a client-centred approach, concluding that this is indeed the case.

This article is a structured reflection on the author's experiences of both music therapy and arts and health work within healthcare services and an exploration of the relationship between these two distinct but related practices. It offers examples of various models of using music in healthcare settings, presents definitions of both music therapy and arts and health, and finally explores three key issues that arise when arts and health practice and music therapy meet in healthcare settings. The aim is to raise questions and encourage music therapists to reflect on how they can best interact with arts and health practitioners in their workplaces as well as how they can most effectively define their own work.

This article considers the place of the arts therapies within contemporary health an social care provision, from the perspective of a music therapist employed as a senior manager in an end-of-life healthcare institution. Using St. Christopher's Hospice, London, as a case study, the work of a large group of artists, made up of art therapists, community artists and arts teachers, is profiled, with a particular focus on how they work together, how their work conflicts and overlaps, and the challenges and complexities that service users, members of a multi-professional team, managers and funders all face in understanding what each of the artists has to offer. The question "Is music therapy fit for purpose?" is directed at both the training institutions who educate arts therapies students and the professional bodies who support them and define their work. Their responsibility to understand and articulate the changing environment within which their students and members are expected to practise is placed central to the argument. It is suggested that if music therapy and other arts therapies are to be considered fit for purpose and thus survive the challenges currently facing the health and social care sectors, they may need to reconsider the content of what they teach and revisit their definitions of what arts therapists do.