Three key Health Plan priorities we've found from our work

Last month, in collaboration with Place Matters and Point North, UK Community Foundations published Preventative Power: Community Foundations Partnering With Health - a powerful collection of neighbourhood-level partnerships between the NHS and community foundations to improve health and wellbeing across the UK.

With the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan being published, we’ve looked at those partnerships again.  Here are three key things that stand out as priorities from our work:

A commitment to tackling the social determinants of health

Effective local health services are vital to communities, but health and wellbeing depends on more than services.

Clean air, healthy homes and well-designed neighbourhoods really matter to people.

Our examples show that the NHS in partnership with community foundations can play a vital role in thinking creatively about keeping well and tackling the social determinants of health and wellbeing.

Doing what’s needed to reduce health inequalities

Efforts to help people to find and keep in work or education and training, measures to reduce poverty and investment in social capital and connections all improve health and wellbeing.

There are inspiring examples in Preventative Power demonstrating the power of neighbourhood-level action to reduce health inequalities, showcasing the possibilities of community-level work.

The power of partnership

In the Preventative Power report, there are so many examples of brilliant partnerships between the NHS, community foundations and communities: from work to boost social prescribing in Chester, to the targeting of mental health funds where they are needed most in Essex neighbourhoods, to the creation of a community health fund that fills gaps in services in Bristol.

But to support the full potential of partnerships, we should make it easy - the norm, even - to partner. 

To do this, the NHS funding model needs to move from siloed, short-term funding, to a model that allows more flexibility and longer-term thinking.  We need a culture that values communities as equal partners, recognising in them the entrepreneurial that can address the issues of today, and of tomorrow.

Read our Preventative Power report