9 - Health and well-being

Summary

Introduction

Some community workers may have a specific focus on health and well-being, but for anyone doing community work, the health and well-being of the individuals and communities they are involved with will no doubt be important to them. It really is, we suggest, the role of all community workers.

Jane Mitchell, who manages a community-led health charity, emphasised the importance of the role the community plays in community in health and well-being in an interview for this chapter:

‘COVID-19 really showed the need for a communitybased response to addressing health. Local communities know and understand their issues and have the networks to drive forward support. They have local knowledge and people buy into local things. We had so many people get in touch during COVID wanting to volunteer. They didn't know about, or didn't want, to go through area-wide organisations. They wanted to go through a local group.’ (Jane Mitchell, 2022, Interview)

There has of course been a long tradition of community involvement in health. For example, in the UK, where the authors live and work, public participation through the charitable movements and the burgeoning Labour movement was responsible for driving health improvement in the 19th century. The advent of a National Health Service (NHS) in 1948 in the UK led to an understanding that health was more the preserve of the NHS and the experts within it than of the community or patients. Since the 1970s there has been increasing recognition at both international level and more locally of the importance of understanding health from this broader, community perspective (Taylor, 2003).

This recognition is driven by a clear imperative to focus on prevention. Increasing pressures on health services, because of ageing populations and changing professional and patient expectations, have confirmed the need to look for more upstream and preventative interventions in the social determinants of health – these determinants being the economic, social, environmental and cultural conditions that influence our health.

The social determinants of health are the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life.