Creating Healthy Communities Together with The Kings Fund
Healthy Communities Together is an innovative partnership between the NHS, the council and the voluntary sector in Croydon. Supported by the King’s Fund and the National Lottery, it aims to improve wellbeing and reduce inequality by engaging local people to shape services.
We have a vision to transform how we deliver care and our One Croydon Alliance has been working hard to do this – moving power to local people and communities, focusing on the wider determinants of health and being proactive in preventing ill-health – but we know we need to do more to help reduce local health inequalities.
Over the next two years, it's been agreed that funding will be given to each local community partnership, and the members of the local community partnership will be able to link the use of those funds to the community plan.
By working collaboratively with local community groups, particularly those in the voluntary sector, we are creating an ecosystem where communities can support each other more efficiently. This will not only help to empower and engage members of our community, but also to promote their independence and ensure their needs are met.
We believe that the strong voluntary and community sector in Croydon is best placed to empower people to improve their wellbeing, and we have seen this in action in the collective local response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We want to build on and develop an even better quality of partnership for our borough. We want One Croydon to be part of a much broader coalition, connected to all sections of our community.
We have huge differences in financial inequality and health inequality, so we really need programmes that are locality based to meet the needs of people in different parts of the borough and we are starting to put these in place. Our focus over the first nine months, as we develop our locality approach, will be to hear from people locally and act on what they tell us; to develop a new way of commissioning that brings our budgets together across health and the care; and develop leadership that fully involves the voluntary and community sector as well as the statutory bodies.
For more information on The Kings Fund, see here or watch the full YouTube video about our Trus's One Croydon Alliance below: