The NHS Alliance welcomes this report highlighting as it does the poor social, health and well- being outcomes and the life experiences endured by residents in some, but by no means all, disadvantaged estates. We agree that heavy financial investment is not the answer and the most successful and lasting solutions occur when residents are supported by service providers towards self-management of their communities, as echoed in the case studies used.
NHS Alliance spokesperson, Hazel Stuteley OBE said: “We support a social model of health creation. A number of our the Alliance leadership team have considerable expertise of implementing this and a 20 year track record of transforming dysfunctional estates across the UK, using an evidence and assets based framework. Our consistent experience is that this not only works and lasts, but leads to large scale improvement of health and social behaviours.
“However, while this report contains some questionable generalisations about social housing estates, it highlights the fact that although we have known for decades what really works, there has not, to date, been a systematic evidence-based mainstream approach to reversing the decline of our challenged estates. We therefore support the report’s recommendation of a ‘National Estate Recovery Board’ to complement the ongoing work of the Troubled Families programme and look forward to collaborating with and supporting this approach.”
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Trained at Kings College Hospital London, Hazel was a practicing Health Visitor for 35 years, within disadvantaged communities, rural and urban. In 1995 she co-founded the multi -award winning Beacon Project reversing the decline of a deeply disadvantaged community in Falmouth.
Following a year’s secondment with the Department of Health in 2001-2, she accepted a Senior Research Fellowship at the Peninsula Medical School and became a founder member of the Health Complexity Group (HCG) who use insights from complexity science to understand transformative change.
Hazel is currently Programme Director of C2 Connecting Communities at the University of Exeter Medical School, an evidence based intervention, researched and developed with HCG, which has a track record of consistently delivering transformative outcomes to challenged communities in the South West and nationally.
Hazel has been identified by HSJ as within the top 100 most influential NHS clinical leaders in the country.
NHS Alliance is the leading independent voice for providers of health and social care outside hospital. It is the only not-for-profit membership organisation to bring together frontline clinicians and organisations of all kinds in our communities – from general practice, community pharmacy to providers of housing and emergency services.
For more information visit www.thehealthcreationalliance.org
For further information, please contact Rebecca Riffel:
e:rebecca.riffel@salixandco.com
t: 020 8675 4779 or 24 / 7 media line: 07725 555030