The ambition to shift to preventative and community-based care sets out an important direction and challenge for the healthcare sector to meet. Trusts will be key to delivering this shift, and encouragingly are already leading initiatives to turn this into reality. Community-based programmes such as the three innovative case studies of Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, and South London Listens exemplify the potential of health hubs to deliver accessible, preventative services tailored to local needs.
These programmes not only improve patient outcomes and reduce the demand for secondary services but also help foster stronger community engagement and collaboration. By removing barriers to access and providing services in convenient, familiar settings, health hubs can play a crucial role in tackling health inequalities and promoting overall wellbeing.
As the sector moves forward under unprecedented operational pressures and delivers the government's shifts, trust leaders could consider utilising innovative practices such as health hubs as part of their offer to patients, to ensure they are responding to the needs of the populations they serve. Trust leaders could:
- Spend time engaging, listening to and understanding their local community to help tailor health hub or other community programmes to specifically meet the needs of their patient populations, and address health disparities within them.
- Engage in continuous feedback with communities to co-design service improvements, and ensure initiatives remain responsive to community needs.
- Work with system partners, including local government and voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise sector (VCFSE) colleagues, to share expertise, support service delivery, build trust with communities.
- Maximise accessibility for health hubs or alternative initiatives, to provide easy to access, open and holistic services to all community members in familiar settings.
- Ensure that programmes meet statutory guidance to work with partners to put people at the centre of everything they do.
- Analyse population health data from their trust (and wider systems) to improve intelligence on community health, and to further improve healthcare access, safety, experience, and performance.
- Offer a range of clinical and non-clinical services, considering wraparound support services that tackle the wider determinants of health, which support the individual's holistic needs and enable patients to manage their own long-term health and wellbeing through improved skills, knowledge and confidence.
- Consider targeted outreach with specific groups or communities, who may be more likely to experience health inequalities and may face barriers accessing traditional healthcare services.