Welcome to your newsletter. This edition focuses on our response to COVID-19, updates our members on the recent Primary Care Network Workshops and reviews our Power Shifting Tools. In addition, we provide an update on our media and social media activities, including how we have been advancing your on-line movement.
We hope you enjoy reading your newsletter. If you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Merron Simpson Brian Fisher
Chief Executive Chair
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS
Given NNHSA’s cross sector and multidisciplinary membership and reach, we believe we are well placed to capture our member’s thoughts, views and experiences of dealing with COVID-19 over a period of time, or at a single point of time only.
We will collate and analyse this information to enable us to share our members experience, while identifying the key learnings we can adopt in the coming years.
Whether a one-off, occasional or weekly submission, we would welcome contributions, in any format, that enables you to express your thinking, feelings and learnings e.g. written, photographs, clippings from a paper, a mobile phone video, a telephone message, or a series of tweets.
We very much hope you will be able to support this project.
If you are interested, please drop an e mail to Neil McGregor-Paterson, Director of Communications: neil@realitasconsulting.co.uk
Online platforms supporting our movement
Health Creation Alliance is a movement that, with our members, has been driving action to address health inequalities through Health Creation. We achieve this by helping to organise the strengths and energy that are already there in a community towards this goal.
In support of this, we recognise the power of digital in enhancing our work, while complementing our more traditional approaches to engagement. The diagramme below, and the reports that follow, provide an overview and update on how we are achieving this.
Please don´t forget to follow us on twitter @NHSAlliance
Health Creation Alliance Digital platforms
First Health Creation Forum
Tuesday 7 April | 12:30-13:30
The first Health Creation Digital Forum was held on Tuesday 7 April. Attended by 17 members, the forum provided an opportunity for members to share their experience and learnings on dealing with Coronavirus.
Key discussion points included:
- Clinical staff have largely been redeployed to the COVID19 response
- Communities are stepping up and barriers have disappeared, most notably much of the bureaucracy associated with community-led working
- There are issues about reaching isolated people, especially people who can’t get online or are uncomfortable with digital. Off-line approaches to engagement and targeted support are critical
- Coronavirus is increasing inequalities
- The sheer volume of information on Coronavirus can overwhelm people
- Working with vulnerable communities while people are in social isolation requires new ways of working; do we know who the vulnerable people are?
Finding new ways of working included:
- ‘A right to contact’ (in public policy) – having someone you people can relate and turn to … a ‘right to the opportunity to have contact’ with someone
- Contacting all tenants/patients and connecting them with community groups
- Community strengthening activity – Where communities are strong and people know each other, they are more resilient
Universal broadband, support to get older people online?
Join us on Tuesday 21 April at 12:30 for the next Digital Forum
We will start the Forum by debating:
What new practice has emerged where mobilised communities are operating in new ways at the boundaries of the formal health and care system, and what can we learn from these?
For example, the community stepped up to look after a patient with an existing heart condition when the clinician was taken away to focus on COVID-19 patients
Look out for the updated invite to this Forum and all other Forums to the end of June.
Coming soon – Health Creation WhatsApp Group
In the coming weeks we will be launching a Health Creation WhatsApp Group. Our aim is to stimulate discussion and debate and to support our members engage with others in the fight against health inequalities through Health Creation.
Watch this space!
A North Yorkshire Health Creation Movement meeting
On Thursday 24 April, the second meeting of the NNHSA North Yorkshire Movement was held. Established by our active member, Lisa Holden, the first meeting was held on 14 February 2020.
The focus of the meeting was COVID-19 and the local community response to supporting vulnerable people in the region. This includes establishing the Ryedale Community Service Organisation to bring together the resources and energy of key community partners who are experienced in the development of volunteer support and management.
A key output of the meeting was an agreement to explore a new cross-sector collaboration, the aim of which is to capture and learn from North Yorkshire’s community response to COVID-19.
If you are interested in establishing your own regional movement, please let us know.
Primary Care Networks and Health Inequalities – event series
It was great to see so many people at our events in February looking at the question ‘How can Primary Care Networks succeed in reducing health inequalities?’
Key findings/learnings from our events series include:
- Primary Care Networks (PCNs) need to include education, housing, probation etc …
- Actual resources need to be invested in ‘integration’, otherwise it won’t happen
- Primary Care Networks must focus on healthy relationships; between household and community members
- ‘Community DJs’ (people with skills in community development) can enable integration between professionals and professionals, communities and professionals, communities and communities.
- There is enough evidence and guidance to act, but there is also an ‘inverse evidence law’
- ‘Radical kindness’ is needed to make the transformation happen
- The DES Contract needs to support culture change, not a tick-box culture
- New roles in PCNs must include non-clinical roles just as Community Development
Unfortunately, the final event had to be postponed. We are looking with partners at how best to capture and spread the key insights in a post-COVID-19 world.
Thank you to all or sponsors and partners, without whom this series would not have been possible.
NNHSA opinion published in The Times Future of Healthcare Supplement
A joint article by Merron Simpson, CEO and Dr Brian Fisher, Chair published in The Times Healthcare Supplement on 10 March makes a strong case for a properly funded multi-disciplinary Social Health Service with communities as equal partners and Health Creation at its core:
And here is our formal response to the Marmot 10 years on report:
And a blog from Dr Brian Fisher who considers how the pandemic has demonstrated the power of community action in Health Creation: https://www.thehealthcreationalliance.org/category/blogs/
How to shift power – new resources from NNHSA
An unhealthy power dynamic between formal services and the people they serve is now understood to be a key factor behind entrenched and enduring health inequalities.
Health Creation Alliance produced a set of ‘power tools’ for Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partners. We are now making them more widely available as a free resource to help busy leaders throughout the health, care and community sectors to practice ‘power-shifting’ within their day-to-day situations.
The Power Deck and Power Narrative are now available for you to download and use for free. Please click here: https://www.thehealthcreationalliance.org/power-shifting/
If you would like to find out more about our Discovery Learning Programme – that helps organisations and systems both to shift power and to embed Health Creation throughout all aspects of their practice, please email: Peter Hay peter_hay@btinternet.com or Merron Simpson merron@newrealities.co.uk for an informal conversation.
