Locality: Creating Health and Wealth by Stealth

Locality, part of the VCSE Health & Wellbeing Alliance, have published a new report – Creating Health and Wealth by Stealth.

The report explores the role of large, well established community organisations in promoting good health and preventing disease in their neighbourhoods. Working with 20 Community Anchor Organisations (CAOs) across England and 10 service designers and commissioners across local, regional, and national health systems, Locality found four distinct areas of learning:

• Maximising good practice – across pandemic partnerships learning, peer-led health promotion, and co-location of clinical services in CAO settings.
• Finding the right delivery approach – including ‘Integrated Health and Wellbeing Services’, and social prescribing.
• Achieving collaborative commissioning – through inclusivity and cultural competence, asset-based community development, and capacity and capability building.
• Measuring outcomes usefully – by understanding the impact of services on the wider determinants of health, and collecting data and monitoring impact in a meaningful way.

The report contains real-life examples demonstrating good practice across these four areas that can be repeated across the country. But there are also warnings of the pitfalls that threaten this progress.

The report presents 12 recommendations for the health system across the four areas above – at Primary Care Network, Integrated Care System, local authority, and national level.

You can download the report here.