With increasing demands on resources across the health and care system, new and innovative approaches to delivering high quality care and support are needed, which focus on the person’s needs, behaviours, and their environment to improve their health and wellbeing.
Population health improvement is the golden thread that runs through all NAPC work. We support healthcare systems to develop innovative approaches to personalised health, care and wellbeing that improve outcomes for people and the workforce that serves them. This in turn creates a more sustainable healthcare system. We have seen fantastic improvements in outcomes from smaller scale population health improvement initiatives just as much as we have from larger system wide care redesign.
Participants undertaking the national CARE programme can put their learning into practice by working on a population health improvement initiative, based on local need and their own interests. These projects cover a broad range of needs and have already demonstrated measurable improvements in patient health and wellbeing, predicted to reduce demand on GPs.
Read the case study: Redesigning care pathways for people with long term conditions
Without planetary health there can be no population health – this is about future climate breakdown and also the environment that many communities live in today.
When personalised care is coproduced with patients taking a holistic approach to their needs, this creates empowered communities with people who are better able to support themselves through proactive self management and self care. Creating the right conditions for people to be healthy and supporting them to remain healthy is the key to proactive, preventative care. A great example of this is the support provided by Community Health and Wellbeing Workers (CHWW) which has led to ‘health creation’ across a deprived housing estate in Churchill Gardens, Westminster.
The role of the CHWW is to ensure targeted populations in areas of deprivation receive tailored health and wellbeing support by visiting people in their own homes and looking after everyone in the household. CHWW are people selected based on their character rather than their characteristics; those who are helpful, problem solvers, confident and persistent whilst maintaining respect and confidentiality to earn trust of residents. The specially recruited teams get to know families and assess their health, social and wellbeing needs, promote healthy living, signpost to appropriate services and make referrals to NHS services.
