Healthy Communities Together - phase two
In 2020 - in partnership with The King’s Fund - we launched the Healthy Communities Together (HCT) programme.
Offering up to £3 million in National Lottery funding, plus £850,000 of development support from The King’s Fund, the programme was designed to support partnership-working in local areas between the voluntary sector, the NHS and local authorities, aiming to tackle health inequalities and improve the wellbeing of communities.
We are now pleased to confirm the five participating areas selected to receive further funding and support through the second phase of the HCT programme.
Leeds, Plymouth, Croydon, Gloucestershire, and Coventry will each be receiving up to £450,000 of further National Lottery funding, in addition to support from The King’s Fund, to continue until 2024.
This funding will support the successful areas to build on the ideas, plans and new ways of working developed in the first phase of the programme.
Coventry Healthy Communities Together
In this blog, we’ll look at how Coventry Healthy Communities Together is ensuring the powerful tool of lived experience is at the centre of its work to reduce health inequalities and improve the relationship between sectors.
By 2025, Coventry Healthy Community Together wants people in Coventry to have better mental health and wellbeing than they did when the programme started, with a reduction in health inequalities, healthier people and communities with more resilience.
The partnership
The Coventry Healthy Communities Together partnership is made up of representatives from Grapevine Coventry and Warwickshire, Coventry and Warwickshire partnership NHS Trust, and Coventry City Council.
At the beginning of the programme, the various teams shared their experiences of collaboration and identified their shared motivations.
Working through challenges together, the partnership agreed to:
- Hold each other to account
- Ask questions of each other
- Spend more time understanding their individual and collective values and principles.
Phase one (2021) - Person, place and first-hand experience
In 2018, Sam (a pseudonym) had what he describes as a “complete mental breakdown”, the culmination of a series of traumatic life experiences that eventually took their toll on his health. Sam’s story, not of victimhood but of his strengths, has been at the centre of three “Big Conversations” that took place last year in Willenhall, facilitated by the Coventry Healthy Communities Together partnership.
These conversations brought together a range of health, voluntary and social care professionals - as well as local residents - in one room to listen to Sam speak and reflect on his experiences of using local services - from what helped, what didn’t work, and what could be done differently.
Starting not from the existing institutions but from the people – the “Big Conversations” in Willenhall helped to form strong relationships, listen to people with lived experience, and join forces with everyone in the system. Those in attendance were encouraged to ‘park their power and take their lanyards off’.
Phase two (2022-24) - What happens next?
Now into its second phase, the Coventry Healthy Communities Together partnership is working collaboratively to develop an action plan that will address health inequalities and improve the experience for people using health services in Willenhall, using Sam’s experiences and the “Big Conversations” as the foundations.
With the £450,000 of National Lottery funding awarded through the second phase of the Healthy Communities Together programme, the partnership plans to deliver “Big Conversations” across five more areas of Coventry, with new community groups being encouraged to participate in the programme and deliver ongoing conversations.
From senior health clinicians to local voluntary groups, and from senior mental health strategists to shopkeepers and vicars, Coventry Healthy Communities Together will create a space for conversations to take place in a human environment. This helps bonds to form and a shared sense of challenge everyone can gather around, bringing communities and the voluntary sector into the process of creating integrated care services.
The impact of this way of working will be to find new ways of doing things, nurtured from the ground up, with a focus on community participation and leadership.
This will change the way services and communities connect in order to give people the best chance of getting and staying well.
Over time we will hopefully see fewer health inequalities, people getting healthier and communities becoming more resilient as a result of both local and systemic changes.
The partnership will also use the second phase of the Healthy Communities Together programme to consider scale-up changes from the local level in Willenhall to the whole of Coventry. It will focus on making itself more visible to people in the places and structures influencing how services are planned and delivered - for example the Coventry and Warwickshire Integrated Care System.
