The New NHS Alliance 2018 Partnership Summit was a resounding success.
‘Health Creation: Wealth Creation – fighting health inequalities using community assets’, explored and identified how the various types of assets – citizen, physical and workforce – can play a role in creating health to help address the injustice of health inequalities.
Chaired by Jeanelle De Gruchy, President of the Association of Directors of Public Health, the Summit featured contributors who enable, deliver and have lived-experience of Health Creation and who have experience on how assets can be deployed to fight health inequalities.
The Summit’s partners, speakers, compelling case studies and delegates learnt about a wide-range of approaches to recognising , identifying, and deploying assets.
The learning that took place, and the outputs from the Summit, are particularly relevant in the light of the government’s NHS Long-Term Plan. Employing health creating approaches at the frontline across all services is core to achieving real reductions in health inequalities.
New NHS Alliance statement on the Plan. Read more…
Public Heath Executive article on the Summit outputs and the Plan. Read more…
A key theme emerging from the Summit was for better education – of professionals and the public – about what ‘health’ really means. Currently people tend to associate ‘health’ with ‘the National Health Service’, whereas the World Health Organisation definition is much more relevant.
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Constitution of the World Health Organization: Principles
As a result of this and other discussions emerging from the event, New NHS Alliance is calling for:
- Widespread adoption of Health Creation across all sectors – creating health is everyone’s business and must be everyone’s priority: the NHS, communities, housing, pharmacy, businesses, primary care and local authorities.
- Better education for all sectors and communities – in schools, colleges, universities, community centres – on the health and wellbeing consequences of health inequality, and how to go about creating the conditions that make and keep people well.
- Better use of assets – such as getting best social value from health estate – in the fight against health inequalities.
- People and community-centred approaches, such as community development, to become routine in support of Health Creation and the fight health inequalities.
- Changes to procurement frameworks to enable local people to be commissioned to self-organise.
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