Partnering with community groups is key to tackling health inequalities, according to a report by the Health Innovation Network.
The Innovation for Healthcare Inequalities Programme (InHIP) impact and learning report, looked at the progress of the programme, whereby funding was granted to Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) to support local projects across England to help tackle health inequalities.
Across the first stage of the programme, projects were designed and implemented across 38 ICSs, with 34,000 people from underserved groups or deprived areas coming into contact with interventions. Around 8,000 of these were able to gain access to an ‘innovative product’ or treatment pathway, and 4,000 had broader health needs identified and were referred on to additional services, according to the report.
The report identified that getting help from community organisations was a key learning from this phase of the project. It suggested that this was important for finding and engaging with target groups, and that co-designing programmes was the ‘key to success’.
‘Teams built new partnerships with local system leaders, VCSE organisations, and community champions, who are trusted and have well developed relationships with local groups, to engage with the local community and better understand their needs,’ the report said.
‘This proved key to success. For example, the team in Yorkshire & Humber partnered with England Boxing and the Football Foundation to run health checks in local sport facilities, leading to registrations with GPs, interest in further information and positive feedback from attendees.’
It also suggested that taking a whole-household approach to help families could help patients live healthier lives, such as asthma interventions which aimed to improve paediatric asthma management by supporting their families to stop smoking.
The report highlighted 14 case studies across England that aligned with the Core20PLUS5 approach to reducing healthcare inequalities, including bowel cancer screening in the East of England, improving access to CVS health checks by better understanding barriers for underserved communities in North East and North Cumbria, and respiratory interventions in South London and Oxford.
The authors of the report said: ‘As we celebrate the first wave of this programme, we look forward to taking our learning and cementing it in our approaches to tackling healthcare inequalities in both InHIP Wave 2 and other key areas of work. It is essential to our healthcare ambitions that we use this opportunity to exchange our knowledge and learning about what works and what does not work.
‘We need to be bold, we need to be innovative and we need to work with the communities most impacted by health inequalities. The impactful work to date shows that if national and local teams, innovators, and community leaders work together, we can reduce barriers to access which will improve patient experience and health outcomes. Together we can achieve meaningful change to provide better healthcare for the population.’
It comes as the CQC is to launch a health inequalities framework for ICSs in February 2025, following testing in four areas this year.
