Creating A Healthier UK

Empowering citizens, communities and societies to flourish and create equitable, good and sustainable healthy communities

Last year I was approached by Dr Michael Dixon, Co-Chair of The College of Medicine (CoM), to ask if BSLM would be interested in joining forces with the CoM and other organisations working with people in their neighbourhoods and communities to find ways to understand and support the creation and sustainable maintenance of good health and flourishing for individuals and communities. The ambition of the collaboration ‘is to work with health and care professionals, together with the Third Sector, to support the empowerment of citizens to create healthy communities’.

I am pleased to share that on 8th July we will be taking this work to the UK Parliament. We will be making the case for this approach directly to politicians, and exploring how to engage the parliaments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

When the Collaboration uses the term ‘health creation’, it is implicit that this includes planetary, environmental, societal, community, as well as individual health creation.

There are already many initiatives underway across the UK that aim to support communities improve their local areas to enable healthier living. Sometimes the initiatives exist in ‘silos’ though. This Collaboration aims to link these grass-roots initiatives in neighbourhoods and communities to create a more co-ordinated cultural shift in the way we view and work with health and illness. What we would like to see from a BSLM perspective is a move from a purely financial economy to a wellbeing economy.

We know that many of you are already working in your local communities to improve the health and wellbeing of individual patients and populations. In addition, some of you are working at an academic or political level to influence change as well. What we wish to achieve is a better understanding of the interventions that make for a healthy and flourishing society, in a way which makes it easier to implement policies and practices which enable these. Our aim is to raise awareness amongst the public that there are options beyond pills to achieve better health outcomes and that improving our relationships with our wider environments s is a key factor in sustaining and maintaining good health.

What we wish to see is a better understanding of the shared barriers to health creation in today’s systems and agree a way of working together to reduce these. Key goals are:

• To better understand the shared aspirations for health creation and successes in today’s systems and agree a way of working together to support these.
• To help non-health organisations quantify their contribution to health and community wellbeing in order that they can be included in wider discussions and initiatives on how to create good health and flourishing.
• To agree a measurement or series of measures of sustainable good health.
• To consider how a new economic model could be developed which prioritises human and ecological wellbeing. The focus should be on the equitable distribution of benefits and resources and restoring planetary health.
• To promote to and communicate with the NHS, national and local Government the extensive health creation that organisations within and outside the NHS can and do offer.
• To help support the systemic change that would allow the NHS to commission more preventative and health creation strategies, rather than solely focussing on the expensive, and relatively less effective, management of ‘downstream’ preventable conditions.

To succeed the Collaboration must remain focussed on delivering action-orientated change relevant to health and care practitioners working in today’s health and care systems and to transform environments to enable individuals to make healthier choices. It will also require a set of ethical principles to safeguard against corporate interests diluting the agreed purpose of the Collaboration.

Dr Frances Elliot

Chair, BSLM