Here (Care Unbound Ltd)

Our intern Kitty has come on to explain the difference between ‘equity’ and ‘equality’. Take a look at and learn about different meanings and definitions for yourself! You can download our ‘What do we mean by?’ Guide for free on our website!

Siân Brand asked me to share three ideas for the NHS to enhance its health and well-being goals. The main point is that "Health" cannot be achieved by a clinician alone without thriving communities. 1. Health and well-being depend on social connectedness, economic and environmental security, and social justice principles. It's important to recognize the human need for choice, control, learning, and creating new things for ourselves and our communities. My first recommendation is to stop seeing communities as groups of sick people and instead, view them as health-creating entities. Find ways to support communities in discovering, connecting, and mobilizing their own health-creating capacities. Supplement those capacities; stop supplanting them. Currently, many NHS trusts are oblivious to all the ways they are harming community health creation. First do no harm. 2. The What Works Centre for Wellbeing (UK) highlights that community well-being is influenced by factors such as neighborhood belonging, community cohesion, and community control. My second recommendation is to focus on neighborhoods as primary sites for health, moving resources out of institutional silos and investing in community alternatives instead of costly and often ineffective interventions that solely address sickness. Social Prescribing alone is not enough. Liberate resources and push them upstream into small local CIC who can act as imbedded intermediaries, located in and trusted by their local communities. They are best placed to animate local Community well-being, with support. Remember you (the NHS) will not engage communities until you first enable community to be built from inside out. Modern life is shredding our social fabric. We much tend to the rip and to issues of poverty and inequity. 3. Yishun Health in Singapore has transformed its health approach through an asset-based community development strategy, involving residents in health-creating activities of their own choice. https://lnkd.in/eCG_GuSp My third recommendation is to study Yishun Health's population health strategy, which aligns with Singapore's "3 beyonds" national strategy: Beyond Healthcare to Health, Beyond Hospitals to Communities, and Beyond Quality to Value. I would add a fourth beyond: from sickness to well-being and fairness, as there can be no well-being without fairness, as Isaac Prilleltensky reminds us. In my humble opinion, the above recommendations have a good chance of freeing up the resources needed to implement proportionate universalism, as described by Sir Michael Marmot. Perhaps more importantly, it will be experienced as genuine solidarity, not charity, by communities that have been left to languish due to a top-down institutional promissory note that has been bouncing across all party lines for four decades in the UK.