Warning: Conferences are dangerous! They expose you to ideas which may be contagious.

This week I went to the Health Equity Network Conference (#HEN2024)in Birmingham alongside a whole load of committed and passionate people from public, private and voluntary organisations from across the country. The work and the thinking of Sir Michael Marmot informs the work of the Health Equity Network and the Institute of Health Equity and there is a lot to learn, in terms of reducing health inequalities by working to improve the wider determinants of health, from the 50 Marmot Places across the UK. ?

Events like this fill me with hope and renewed optimism that we can already see changes in how we work together to make life fairer for all and, in making life fairer we are having a positive impact on the health of people affected by poverty and inequity. They also fill my head with lots of questions and I usually leave with a great big list of things to find out about and reports and articles to read! (I am going to have to find out about ‘ontological security’ and read the National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing (APPG AHW) report on Creative Health for starters!). Of course there is always a startling fact that just messes with my head – yesterdays was that every year the government pays over ￡10billion into the bank accounts of private landlords through housing benefits (of course I checked this and came across this brief note from the New Economics Foundation).

On the same day as the conference the NHS Confederation working with Local Trust published four documents on Integrated Neighbourhood Working (which I have scanned but have yet to read properly) promoting ‘community-led approaches to health and wellbeing’.

Both these initiatives/ movements/ programmes, call them what you will, recognise the immense power and value of working with communities and VCFSE organisations. This is wonderful and it is great to see this public acknowledgement of the strengths, support and skills that people in our communities rely on every day. And it is heartening to hear in the NHS Confed work that developing a ‘neighbourhood health service’ or ‘shifting care into the community’ does not mean shifting a medical model into communities. On the other hand, all too often this kind of sentiment is followed by calls for ‘training’ and ‘upskilling’ of community organisation staff and volunteers, for quality assurance mechanisms, targets and outcome measures, and talk of ‘patients’ and ‘practitioners’ and ‘delivery’ and, before we know it, we are looking at ‘Community Services’ shaped in the likeness of statutory services, specified by commissioners, and we risk losing the essence of why VCFSE organisations work. The work because they are genuinely community led, people focused and strengths based. They work because they meet real need and adapt to needs as they change and they work because people support people not because they are ‘practitioners delivering a service to patients’.

I hope we can make the changes that are so needed in health prevention, health creation and health and social care services. I hope that we can help this to happen through the power of Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprises. I believe that we can do so whilst maintaining the strength and uniqueness of all those organisations that make VCFSE organisations so perfect as hosts and facilitators of neighbourhood health services and key actors in making an equitable health and social care system accessible to all. What we need is more trust, more hope, improved partnerships, stable resourcing and recognition that healthy communities are a public good.

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