Community-centred public health: taking a whole system approach
Resources to enable local systems to implement and embed community-centred approaches to health and wellbeing at scale.
Documents
Details
Public Health England (PHE) has conducted research into current practice on whole system approaches to community-centred public health. This builds on previous guidance on community-centred approaches to health and wellbeing. Community-centred approaches are those that mobilise assets within communities, encourage equity and social connectedness and increase people’s control over their health and lives.
Having public health systems that are community-centred is important to reducing health inequalities. Many local areas are prioritising this by scaling action through whole system approaches. This work builds on previous work on whole system approaches to obesity and is part of ongoing work to support and embed place-based approaches to reducing health inequalities.
We have produced a suite of resources, which are intended for use by local authority, NHS and voluntary and community sector (VCS) decision makers, to help them to:
- improve the effectiveness and sustainability of action to build healthy communities
- embed community-centred ways of working within whole systems action to improve population health
These resources include:
- briefing paper - a summary of our findings
- slide-deck - a presentation of our main findings
- collection of practice examples
- list of alternative whole system frameworks