An end of year blog by Merron Simpson, Chief Executive of The Health Creation Alliance
The closing of 2024 and the starting of 2025 feels different to other year ends and beginnings. Having some clarity about how UK politics may pan out over the next few years could be a part of it. But I suspect it is more likely to be down to an increasing number of people experiencing a ‘tumbleweed moment’; a growing realisation among public sector workers that running services as we have been doing no longer makes sense to an increasingly diverse and economically divided public, nor to an increasingly pressured workforce.
It feels like a watershed moment, when the choices we make in the future matter more than they might have done in the past. Do we continue to do things that we are familiar with? Or do we try to change how things are done so that they make more sense? At what point does it become riskier to stick with what we know? And if we do decide that change is necessary, how do we go about it?
The Health Creation Alliance (THCA) is experiencing this in several ways:
- More individuals are approaching us wanting to ‘plug in’ in some way, to feel part of something bigger that resonates with them, a change process they can connect with and be a part of
- More individuals within organisations and systems want to know how our approach might help them to ‘push through’ to make health creation business as usual
- We are receiving more invitations to be part of ‘networks of networks’ – to increase the collective voice of organisations wanting the change to happen
- More influential national organisations are saying similar things to us – whether or not they use the same or similar language (which is immaterial)
Through 2024 THCA made some important shifts that have no doubt helped to position the organisation as a truly change-making movement.
- Our new manifesto – published just one week ahead of the general election announcement and launched with Prof Bola Owolabi – explained how a health creating approach can drive change across whole systems as well as create health within communities.
- The appointment of our first five THCA Ambassadors (chosen from 25 who expressed an interested) has persuaded us of the appetite and energy for action; they are increasing our capacity for deeper, broader influence across more sectors
- Our submissions to ChangeNHS and the Select Committee Inquiry into Cost of inaction in social care [link] where we make a case for a shift to health creating models of health and care
- Our ability to view the change process through many lenses and support it from many perspectives (both clinical and social determinants) is giving us the edge in deep system change – we can literally start anywhere and systematically support systems to build out from where their energy for change is
THCA ended 2024 on a high, welcoming Lord Gus O’Donnell, a former head of the civil service, to explore the change process with us at an event that took place on 5 December. This rich conversation with Prof Donna Hall, Dr Priya Kumar and Dawn Shepherd, has helped to cement THCA’s role as a ‘space-holder’, holding and stewarding the space between top-down and ground-up, between communities and services and between the different sectors, allowing new relationships to form with a new, more equal, more health creating power dynamic than has typically been the case.
But the status quo is a powerful thing, especially when held in place by a combination of evaluation approaches and assessment frameworks that belong to the previous era; and when this involves a shift in resources across systems.
It’s easy to surmise that the change isn’t working when we use the wrong yardstick. So, the changes ahead for THCA through 2025 and beyond will be more deliberate than in the past.
To ready ourselves, in the first half of the year we will:
- Recruit two or three new Non-Executive Directors to bring new, highly relevant insights and skills (as we say goodbye to our long-standing, valued colleague and former chair, Dr Brian Fisher)
- Publish new ground-breaking research into how tenants of social housing could have an unmediated voice to government and to regional mayors on issues that affect them
- Host an Action Summit codesigned with our members and partners – that will explore pioneering examples of health creating communities, health and care systems, housing, spaces and places and routes into employment
- Continue to enhance and develop our commissioned change work to support the change-shifts in and with systems and organisations. while building diverse and courageous leaders for Health Creation
- Work with our active members and connect with a range of organisations to explore longer-term partnerships that might bring about the sort of change we all want.
Our society is now so divided in so many ways that taking radical steps to reconnect across the various divides is the only way forward. The old ways of working cannot continue and as devolution takes its course it is important that we don’t simply “devolve the dysfunction” (in the words of Prof Donna Hall).
The Health Creation Alliance is leading a movement of what we sometimes call ‘devolution from the ground up’; because health is created in and by communities and at the intersection between communities and frontline services. The role of everyone else – across all sectors and at all levels of communities, organisations, systems and policy-making – is to create the conditions for communities to create health and to remove the barriers, of which there are many.
If you would like to join this exciting new chapter and become a part of the change that needs to happen, you can become a member here. We look forward to working with you.
