Community Power: it’s a way to make a difference every day

Goodness me we are in April already. The days seem to slip past so quickly at present. Last week went by in a blur, but it had lots of highlights. One of which was the Stronger Things 2022 conference. Now I haven’t been to a face to face conference since 2018. Mainly because since then, conferences had ceased to feature so prominently in my life. In the previous 20 years I had presented 116 papers at conferences in 25 different countries. That was a lot of words written and many miles travelled. Thankfully on this occasion, I only had to travel to London, and best of all, I had no paper to present and was attending simply as a conference delegate – sheer luxury. 

The conference was held at the wonderful Guild Hall in London facilitated by New Local. This is a fabulous organisation that operates as an independent thinktank. It has a mission to transform public services and to do so through ‘unlocking’ community power. It was this mission that drew me to the conference in the first place. 

Legislation currently going through Parliament aims to see a more integrated health and social care approach to service provision being developed. The pandemic showed us all just how vulnerable the NHS is, a consequence of many complex interrelated issues. Here are some of these issues:

Money has long been an issue for the NHS. The pandemic masked this fact as the Government paid whatever it took to keep people safe and well. However, with the ‘living with covid’ concept comes a return to a more familiar financial regime. Like Councils, in the future, NHS organisations will have to deliver a balanced financial budget each year. This is something it has never had to do before.

There continues to be many issues impacting the health and care workforce. In the main, there are big shortages of qualified staff across all the professions. Given the nature of education and training of many of the professions, there are no quick solutions to these problems.

We are all living longer, although not always healthily. The numbers of folk living with complex long term conditions continues to rise. There was a pandemic hiatus in people seeking health care early, with the result that for many people, treating their condition has been made more difficult. The pandemic also exposed the real impact of the growing societal inequalities and how these play out in terms of healthy lives. We continue to see a rise in numbers of people with conditions such as obesity and diabetes, often a consequence of the choices we make over our eating and physical activity habits.

Whilst the legislation going through Parliament addresses all of these issues to one degree or another, the most exciting aspect of the proposed changes is what can happen at a local, neighbourhood level, what is being described as ‘placed based care’. Place based care is where community power comes to the fore. At every stage of our lives, we all need the support of others to grow healthily, to develop a moral code to live our lives by, to become educated and knowledgeable, and build relationships that nurture us. Some of us will need greater support than others. That’s where communities and community power come to the fore. It was Hillary Clinton who popularised the Nigeran proverb ‘that it takes a village to raise a child’. The sentiment resonates. 

In many places that sense of community, of being there for others has been lost. Today the wisdom and support that once might have been available from within close knit communities can be hard to come by. I think it’s why so many people end up presenting themselves at their local Emergency department. Nonprofessional advice about life problems, particularly health problems can be difficult to access, even with Google. Equally, professional advice, such as that found in primary care settings can be equally difficult to access.

Don’t get me wrong, hospitals have their place in communities, but the magic of community power, is the possibility of taking a different approach to health and wellbeing, an approach that is part of the very fabric of the communities we all live in. If we can help more people to help themselves and those around them, then we can reduce the number of people who might need professional health care to keep them well and enjoying a good quality of life.

My background is in mental health. Practitioners in mental health services have long recognised the value of seeing individuals as being experts by experience. Often, people are themselves well placed to identify what would help them to thrive. There were many presentations at the conference that drew out what such interventions might be. In the main these were not health interventions. However, where this might be necessary, we heard of examples of how health professionals truly partnered with individuals to find solutions that worked best for the individual. That awful modern term ‘co-produce’ was sprinkled throughout many of the presentations, and although I dislike the term, it did seem appropriate as a description of the experiences being shared by many of the speakers.

It would be impossible to name check all the presenters, but there were some folk who stood out for me. Angela Rayner was an absolute delight to listen to, as was Danny Kruger, an MP from the other side of the house, Donna Hall, who always talks with such great wisdom and experience, drew on her experiences in Wigan and Bolton; Oliva Butterworth was in fine form, and spoke with great forthrightness and authenticity, and when you think about where she works, I thought she was remarkable. There were many other’s. One person who really chimed with me wasn’t a presenter, but a delegate like me. She was a lady called Clare Redfern, and she worked for Stockport Council. Clare has a long history of using community power in areas of social housing, fuel poverty and other aspects of social care. She also heads up a charity called Blood Bikes, see here. I said I would give a mention for this remarkable charity, so Clare, a big thank you to all that Blood Bikes continues to do for the NHS.

My favourite presenter of the conference, however, was Audrey Tang. She was totally inspirational, and I intend to come back to her in my blog next week, which will be posted from a country I have never been to before. There is a time difference, so forgive me if the blog doesn’t get posted at my usual 05.00 next Sunday.