Introduction

It is clear that people's experience of health and wellbeing is affected by both the physical places and neighbourhoods they live in and the relationships and communities they identify with. In fact, places are shaped by communities - how people interact, how they use the space around them, the agency and ownership they feel about where they live, work and play.

As we will know from our own lives, people often do not just identify themselves as part of a community in their neighbourhood - they may feel more part of communities (often more than one) that are not based on geography. For example, other parents with children of the same age, other people who share the same faith, or others who experience disability. This means that communities are central to how we develop and regenerate physical places including neighbourhoods, parks and housing.

Community-centred development helps ensure improved health and wellbeing outcomes through responding to local views and needs, greater community ownership and making the best use of local facilities and assets. More than that, as the Council implements ambitious plans for the Borough together with local people and partners, there is an opportunity to focus on health creation - proactively creating the conditions, wherever we can, to enable people to have the best health and wellbeing, rather than mitigating the impact of poor health.

This report sets out some recommended actions to help connect people and place to improve health and wellbeing, building on some of the great existing strengths in the Borough. I hope you find it useful.

Sarah Bowman-Abouna, Director of Public Health.

Key messages

Communities are the heart of places - both geographic places and the places where people feel 'at home' with others they identify themselves with (which can be many things).

If we start with communities and build flexible approaches and systems, we are more likely to have meaningful partnerships with communities, understand what is important to them, develop joint solution to meet people's needs and get better outcomes for all our communities (addressing inequality).

How do we do this? Through a framework that builds collective aims, enablers and resourced plans, that links working with communities, to developing local places and neighbourhood approaches.

This needs to be about more than our 'service offer', rather it needs to use a system-wide approach, building on evidence, intelligence and partnerships and maximising the opportunity for health creation.

There are examples of local work that we can build on to help us with our approach and a self-assessment tool to support us with where to start.

The report identifies suggested actions to take the work forward. It also reviews progress on the actions identified in last year's report.