New NHS Alliance Action Summit 2017

Health Creation:Wealth Creation – the power of people and communities

Speech by Merron Simpson, CEO New NHS Alliance

  1. The role of professionals

Health Creation is the route to wellness.

Over the last 2 years, members and friendsof New NHS Alliance have been learning about how health creation happens. We have chosen to learn principally from the testimony of people with experience –people whose lives have beentransformed and those who’ve been involved inthat journey of transformation.

That’s not to say we’re not interested the structural factors that cause people to live in poverty, those issues over which Alan Milburn and his team have recently resigned from the Social Mobility Commission – thesestructural factors do present a barrier to good health and productive lives and they are of concern to New NHS Alliance. But we believe in the agency of the people to be well and to stay well … their ability, their energy, their potential. And we’ve seen, time and again, that Health Creationjust doesn’t happen unless it is built on the agency of people.

But we’re not going to get very far in our mission unless we look at what Health Creation means for practitioners – people who are paid to look after people’s health.

If people can create health for themselves, is there a role at all for the professional?

We believe there is. Communities can and do, do a huge amount … but they can do so much more when professionals engage with them on their terms. Those 3 words make a huge difference …on their terms.

You see doctors, drugs and treatments are no longer the solution – they are part of the solution. Medical knowledge and medical solutions are no substitute for the 3Cs of Health Creation – peopleneedsufficient Control over the things that affect them, they need meaningful and constructive Contact with other people, and they needConfidence to see themselves as an asset – both to themselves and to others.

So doctors, pharmacists, social workers, housing practitioners, nurses, fire officers … in fact any professional who engages with members of the public in their day to day job need to exploretheir new roles within a bigger eco-system that is oriented towards creating health. Pharma companies too need towork out the roles that medicines/treatments play in Health Creation.

New NHS Alliance is here to help you to do all of that

  1. The Manifesto

OurManifesto for Health Creation, published in May this year, is an antidote to the biomedical model of health. It is also an antidote to lifestylism – with its messages about eating healthily, taking more exercise, stopping smokingand generally ‘taking responsibility’for our own health.

There is no point in expecting people to do these things if they don’t have sufficient levels of the 3Cs –weneed Control, Contact and Confidence if we are to stand any chance ofeating healthily, taking more exercise, stopping smoking. This applies to us all. There’s a sort of threshold – if we fall below that threshold then our lives start to get complicated and it becomes much, much harder to live a healthy lifestyle. And some people’s lives have become very complex.

So, if we are to address entrenched health inequalities then helping people to have Control, Contact and Confidence must become the primary goal of the health system. And to do that, practitioners in all parts of the system need to be equipped with skills in ‘wellness'– thosecharacterised by the 5 features of health creating practices: listening and responding, truth-telling, a focus on strengths, enabling communities to self-organise and power-shifting (which is perhaps the hardest for professionals who are used to having the upper hand).When these 5 features are working, it provides the conditions for people to gain Control, Contact and Confidence.

Won’t go far wrong if youuse the 5 features as aset of ‘design principles’ – you can adapt your existing services by embedding the 5 features within them; you can adopt new approaches that you see others doing that have the 5 features in them; and if you’re feeling brave you can innovate by working with communities to find whole new solutions.

We’re now going to show you a short video of how one community did this. We’ve called it “Getting our 5-a-day”.

  1. Workforce development

When it comes to the health workforce, we hear a lot in the news about numbers – the need for more doctors, more nurses, more mental health workers. We do need more … but we badly need to go beyond the numbers and look at what the workforce will be doing, and specifically what they will do to Create Health.

Unless we do, our communities will continue to be short changed; our health service doesn’t stand a chance and our economic productivity will continue to lag behind – not something we can really afford to happen in the current moment.

I have a fantasy headline, and it goes something like this:

  • The Government has recognised the complex connections between austerity, health inequalities, poverty, mental health and the burden on the NHS and social care.
  • Weare going to build a health and public sector workforce that is equipped with ‘skills for wellness’ and know-how at every level?
  • We are going to take advice from the experts – those people who are experienced in transforming their own communities into thriving places
  • ‘Wellness’ is going to feature in chapter 1 of all our key policies and strategies – from transport to nursing, from pharmacy to economic development, from mental health to housing

New NHS Alliance intends to get on with the job of enabling the creation of a Wellness Workforce. Our ambition for 2018 is to establish a Wellness Learning Programme.

I’m telling you this now, because we know we can’t do it on our own – we need your help. We are, after all, a movement of people who want this to happen. And a movement is only as good as the people who move in it.

So, we are inviting you to play an active role. We are asking you to consider your role in this and to play your part. In the weeks following the Summit, and into January 2018, we’d like to talk to everyone here today – if you’re happy to do that – so that we can share our thoughts with you and you with us and together we can create a place where people can learn together about the practice of Health Creation.

Please do have a look at our poster outlining our early ideas about this Wellness Learning Programme.

I’m sure you’re aware that the world of healthcare is changing rapidly now. What we’d like to know is whether this moment in time – with new models of care, a shift towards population health and cross-sector collaborations – might just provide the conditions for health creation to flourish.