Tackling health inequalities

Key learnings

Deliver recovery through partnership working

• Develop new collaborative governance models. Many places have developed joint governance models from a period of intense collaboration. Potential models include cross-sector working groups focused on tackling health inequalities, public service boards developing joint responses to cross-cutting issues, and independent commissions to respond to long-term, systemic inequalities.

• Continue to build and strengthen relationships across the public sector and the voluntary and community sector. Use the creation of new, responsive models of collaboration to develop longer term ways of working to tackle health inequalities through the continuing response to Covid-19 and recovery.

• Establish shared roles and teams across the NHS and local government. This will help to break down organisational siloes and provide ‘critical friend’ perspectives across health and economic development. This approach has also facilitated more effective sharing and use of data across local agencies.

• Co-ordinate with the voluntary and community sector to explore how recovery interventions can be designed and delivered with communities. Communities are being empowered and consulted in supporting wellbeing through recovery.

• Work with hyper-local health partners. Many areas have taken action to strengthen the role of GP surgeries as community-based anchors, e.g. through co-located welfare services. Places could explore the legacy of community hubs and the joint health and local authority role in supporting these.

Maximise local impact of health anchors

• Formalise health anchor roles. Create an agreed, shared definition of an anchor institution between local partners. Consider developing an anchor network incorporating health and care bodies within the local footprint and agreeing an ‘anchor charter’ with commitments around procurement, good work and climate action.

• Advance the anchor role of health partners by maximising the wider impact of NHS capital investments on the local economy, developing social value in local NHS supply chains and working locally to respond to emerging needs e.g. PPE, creating job matching from struggling sectors into local health, and progressing existing local and national programmes, such as the One Public Estate.

Review approaches to evidence, measurement and monitoring

• Incorporate wider measures of economic, environmental and social outcomes. Some places are drawing on the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Doughnut Economics tool.

• Monitor progress towards achieving long-term objectives by adopting short-term success measures, operational data and qualitative insights. Leeds are proposing to adopt the Social Progress Index, as well as measuring success through lived experience.

• Develop joint / shared metrics through new collaborations between health and local authorities. Several members reported a need for greater capacity to analyse and interpret data that can be used to inform local agencies, businesses and communities.