What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to your chosen theme?

Access to healthcare is only one of many factors which determine the health outcomes of individuals and populations. Anchor institutions like the NHS can leverage their resources to intervene upstream in the environmental and social ‘determinants of health’.

To be effective, anchor institutions must learn to work in true partnership with their communities to impact these wider determinants. But how in practice will they do this?

Our project will ‘learn by doing’ how an Integrated Care Partnership (ICP), bringing together the NHS and local government,can work collaboratively with community partners toco-create healthy environments.
Using improving air quality as a specific focus, we willengage communities and staff – empowering and supporting them to work togetheracross boundaries to make a difference.

Improving air quality can be community-led (eg ‘play streets’, cycling projects), directly benefits health, and can be linked to carbon reduction, active travel and social inclusion.

What does your project aim to achieve?

Within a Primary Care Network:

– To map existing community initiatives and resources for improving air quality
– To recruit staff and community champions
– Through events, facilitation and access to ICP resources, to train and support champions to co-develop projects which improve local air quality
– To estimate impacts on: health outcomes, environmental, social and economic sustainability
– To develop and share learning on community partnership

Staff from health, care and local government sectors will be invited to participate on an equal footing with community champions to create local initiatives that improve air quality – aligning their work with personal values and empowering them to make meaningful change.

Communities will benefit from improved air quality, from enhanced community networks and resilience.

The project will work with established community initiatives and harness existing resources (e.g. buildings out-of-hours and under-utilised land) to ensure value for money.

How will the project be delivered?

Staff and community engagement will be led by the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare (CSH) who bring expertise in engaging clinical staff on sustainability as well as in promoting intersectoral partnerships for health and green space. CSH has pioneered the measurement of environmental, social and economic sustainability in healthcare.

The ICP will facilitate embedding the project in a local PCN with an air quality concern. Delivery will be supported by linking the project into the ICP Programme Portfolio, reporting to the ICP Delivery Board,  who will consider system benefits and risks. The ICP is committed to a prototyping approach to transformation, taking a bold and needs based approach to change.

ASPH NHS Foundation Trust is a key partner in the ICP and is committed to supporting the project through clinical and QI expertise.  It will actively promote the learning and integrate this into plans for green space development as well as through its anchor institution programme.

What and how is your project going to share learning throughout?

Our project seeks to ‘learn by doing’ how an ICP as an anchor institution can work collaboratively with community partners on determinants of health. Whilst the project will be delivered in one PCN, if successful, principles and themes will be used to inform scale and spread, and feed into other prototypes as per the commitment of the ICP to work with our communities as equal partners.

Learning will be shared through the Q community and beyond through:
– Engagement with the Q Community Sustainable Healthcare SIG – webinars and ongoing forum discussion
– CSH online sustainable healthcare networks, case library and social media
– Creation and dissemination of a video detailing the approach and outcomes (dependent on outcome of separate funding bid)
– Submission to public health and healthcare innovation conferences / journals