Increasing local capacity - Partners-and-Projects - Upstream

The Healthy Living Community increases capacity in …

community services by:

• Identifying gaps in voluntary provision, increasing provision through existing organisations or encouraging competition and innovation to meet new demands.
• Building a safety net, to prevent people falling between services.
• Ensuring that community services are quality-assured and people have choice.
• Working with Councils of Voluntary Services (CVS) to develop skills and capacity.
• Developing trained mentors working as a team across areas and disciplines.
• Networking through local co-ordination ‘hubs' to ensure performance management.
• Representation on multi-disciplinary and local planning teams and joint training.

statutory services by:

• Providing co-ordinated, quality assured provision, with cost-effective intervention.
• Interaction with primary, intermediate and long-term services for a seamless progression from a higher level of professional intervention to a supportive level of community intervention.
• Responding across several key government department initiatives including social inclusion, extended schools, disadvantaged communities, community regeneration.
• Facilitating inter-agency working across all aspects of the wider determinants of health, including exercise, nutrition and diet, alcohol and substance abuse, sexual health, isolation and depression, mental health, lifeskills, counselling, advocacy, benefits, housing, unemployment, disabilities, training, and impacting on the key issues of infant mortality and life expectancy.
• Offering an economic case for preventative services and community-led activities.

communities by:

• Comprehensive mapping of communities, providing signposting and greater choice to a comprehensive range of services.
• Training local people in leadership roles to develop activities that contribute to health and well-being, enabling them to determine the means of delivery and the range of services on offer.
• Consultation, not by the few in formal settings but by all in community contexts.
• Volunteer participants: breaking down the dependency of disadvantaged groups on traditional volunteers by encouraging everyone in the community to share problems and solutions.
• Devolving the health trainer programme into ‘mutual training' within the community itself.
• Training the community and statutory services together in ‘double devolution'.
• Replacing external insulation of statutory dependency by energy from within the community.