The Health Creation Alliance

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Health Creation is a route to wellness. It comes about when local people and professionals work together as equal partners and focus on what matters to people and their communities.
Health Creation requires ‘asset-based’ skills characterised by the five features of health creating practices: listening and responding, truth-telling, strengths-focus, self-organising and power-shifting. When these five features are working, it provides the conditions for people to gain Control, make meaningful Contact with others and build Confidence. People need enough of the 3Cs of Health Creation to be well.

What People Need to Be Well?

To be well people need sufficient

cccs
  • Control over the circumstances of their lives and the things that affect them.
  • Contact with other people that is enjoyable, meaningful and has purpose.
  • Confidence to see themselves as an asset able to have a positive impact on their own and others’ lives.

How do you Achieve This?

The 5 features of Health Creating practices

At the front-line, health creating practices are characterised by one or more of the five features.

Effective, genuine listening to the reality of people’s and communities’ lives is essential. As is acting differently upon what is heard, and not just reverting to the established systems. Listening can also help to build trust that enables truth-telling if people feel safe to open up about matters they might be hiding, even from themselves. Being listened to can also be therapeutic in itself.
When people and practitioners identify and acknowledge what holds them back from creating health, rather than treating illness, they can start to get to the root causes of problems and solutions. This can be a challenge to the system because it is not set up to create health through a social process
Health creation happens when attention is paid to what people can do for themselves or others. Making people aware of their strengths and finding opportunities for them to employ them unlocks their potential and builds confidence for creating health.
Helping people to connect meaningfully with others makes it possible for them to find solutions and take actions together. They are more likely to find purpose in their lives and this drives wellness. Over time, people become less reliant on health and care services.
Lasting health creation happens when the health creating features above result in a power shift from practitioners to people and communities. When people’s expertise and strengths are recognised and valued, they can make good decisions, take action and have an influence over things that affect them and their environment. Services can then adapt and respond accordingly.

Watch Getting our 5-a-day and learn more about the features.

We have also adopted these five features as our own guiding principles and we activity seek to build them in to all aspects of how we run our business.

Embedding the five features into professional practices helps to create the conditions for people to increase their levels of the 3 Cs so that day-to-day work with people becomes more health creating.

How Do You Embed These 5 Features?

This can be achieved by:

Health Creation Alliance represents the avant-garde of modern medicine. We must go beyond pills and procedures if we are going to make a real impact on the health of our patients and communities. Creating health is about the long-term survival of our health services and society itself. Dr Michael Dixon OBE, GP, Co-Chair National Clinical Social Prescribing Champion for NHS England, Chair College of Medicine.

The Health Creation Framework has been developed through listening carefully to people with lived-experience and those people with a track record of working with communities to enable transformation. 

It works because it is based on the lived-experience of disadvantaged people whose lives have been changed for the better – they tell us that these are the key things that made the difference to them.

Learn more about the Roots of Health Creation.

To find out more about the Manifesto for Health Creation please click here.

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