Community-led Health

...encouraging healthy communities

A community-led approach to health improvement is concerned with supporting communities experiencing disadvantage and poor health outcomes to identify and define what is important to them about their health and wellbeing; the factors that impact on their wellbeing and to take the lead in identifying and implementing solutions.

Community-led health is concerned with the community as the focus of, and mechanism for change, rather than the community as a setting for health practice. This makes it fundamentally different from the provision of community-based health services, and different from the participation of communities in pre-determined health initiatives.'

Services

Our role in relation to community-led health is, via CHEX (Community Health Exchange), to provide a resource in supporting community development approaches to health improvement and challenging health inequalities.  CHEX also facilitates a network of community health initiatives and works to support them in developing good practice and influencing health and social policies.

Our current work on community-led health includes:

• Delivery of the CHEX (Community Health Exchange) programme
• Taking forward the outcomes from Healthy Communities: Meeting the Shared Challenge national capacity programme on community-led health
• Piloting the design and delivery of community-led framework across public sector agencies and community and voluntary sector organisations 
• Provision of training and consultancy support on key aspects of community-led health including 'Health Issues in the Community' (HIIC) training and 'Health Issues in the Community' Tutor Training courses

Resources to support community-led health

• Healthy Communities: Meeting the Shared Challenge programme resources and publications
• CHEX publications and training & resources
• Healthy Living Centre Support Programme toolkits/resources and reports & publications
• LEAP for Health planning and evaluation framework