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.
CHWWs live and work within their communities, earning the trust, engaging with and supporting entire households across the spectrum of physical, mental and social health needs. They enable people, arguably those with the most need, to become participants, activated in their own health and care more effectively. Each CHWW is assigned to around 120 households in a defined geographical area, currently the most deprived wards of the country, and they visit each household at least once a month. The CHWWs proactively check-in on local residents, identify health and wellbeing needs, and often solve problems there and then. They get to know families, promote healthy living, signpost to appropriate services and make referrals to local services.
