About HCT Gloucestershire

The vision behind Healthier Communities Together (HCT) Gloucestershire is that everyone in Gloucestershire has the same opportunities to enjoy wellbeing and health. This is not the case now. Healthy life expectancy at birth varies by over 14 years between the richest and the poorest wards in Gloucestershire. The impact of this manifests itself in many ways, including some families having to chose between eating or heating.

We know this vision cannot be achieved by a single individual, sector or organisation. It needs many people to pull together, share resources and this takes time and trust.  It also requires a radical new way of working to get to the cause of health problems and not just dealing with the symptoms.  We need to listen, learn and experiment. This requires high levels of trust between all those who need to come together.

 

HCT is a new alliance that has come together to champion this change.  We work in different fields and for various organisations across Gloucestershire and share a passion and commitment to address health inequality.  We have secured start-up funding from the Kings Fund and National Lottery Community Foundation, which we are using to grow a wide and diverse community of people and organisations who share the HCT vision and want to work collaboratively to make it happen.

 

Our starting point is to create safe spaces and conditions to listen well, build trust and nurture bold thinking, especially with unexpected people in unusual places.  We will stand alongside good ideas and support them to grow until they become business as usual.  We will collect data and intelligence to underpin any changes to policy and funding that may be needed to do this.

 

 
 

HCT will deliver activities under four themes. There will be a Collaboratory as a test bed for innovation will create a space and the conditions for curiosity, learning and experimentation in order to take a fresh approach to a particular ‘wicked issue’ and drive change.

The Stewardship Group

The Stewardship group came together as a group of people who care about this work and successfully bid for start up funding. We see our role as creating and modelling the leadership behaviours for HCT to be successful.

In doing the work we will be guided by three principles

  1. Being Human to one another: we recognise and respond to human variety with bespoke support, we build empathy between people, we recognise the strengths of others, and we seek to trust and be trusted.

  2. Using Learning to enable performance improvement: we use a variety of both quantitative and qualitative data to learn; we create learning cultures; and we fund and commission for learning, not for the delivery of specified services.

  3. Looking after the health of the Systems which create social outcomes: we create the conditions in which people can understand the systems of which they are part, and enable effective collaboration and co-ordination of actors within these systems.

 Reference: Human Learning Systems: Public Services for the Real World, available at:  Human Learning Systems.pdf