Health Partners Programme

The Health Partners Programme aims to build on the work already taking place with key local organisations from the community, voluntary, faith sectors and residents associations to create a culture of health and community resilience that helps local people to lead long healthy lives.

The work and activities that the Health Partners will be engaged on will be determined by the needs of the communities they represent which will be informed by what the data and the evidence tells us is needed.This means there could be a focus on physical health needs such as diabetes, obesity or hypertension or emotional and mental health needs such as depression.

Find out who the Local Health Partners are.

To become a Health Partner an organisation will need to be a registered charity, voluntary or community group, social enterprise or community interest company, or registered social landlord. They will also need to meet certain criteria such as having a safeguarding policy and a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. The CCG will support and advise any organisation who wish to become a Health Partner and does not currently meet that criteria to enable them to do so.

Find out more about what you need to do to become a health partner.

Benefits of becoming a Health Partner

  • Health Partners will benefit from training and development to enable them to provide relevant health support to their communities.
  • The Health Partners Programme will provide recognition for the value they provide in improving the health and wellbeing of the population.
  • Working in partnership with health professional to improve the health of communities by providing self-care support and signposting.
  • To make our services more culturally competent by providing feedback and help and advice.
  • Health Partners will be supported by working with them to create publicity material to help them in their work.
  • It will enable them to increase the profile of their work.
  • Benefit from funding from West London CCG as part of building community resilience in North Kensington.
  • Funding bids to external agencies can be supported by the local NHS
  • Aim of the Health Partners Programme is to support and help build sustainability for the organisations taking part and the work being done.
  • The aim is to move from "talking together" to "doing together"
  • To align all our efforts to tackle health inequalities.

The role of a Health Partners

  • Provide health insights from their work with communities.
    • Winter flu jabs
    • Self-care
    • Stop smoking
    • Take up of cancer screening programmes etc.
  • Will help hold health based conversations about key issues which are of interest to the local community.
  • Assist in delivering health messages in areas with poor health literacy. Helping to promote:
  • To improve the health literacy of their communities
  • Improve health decision making and encourage co-design and co-production
  • Organise community health events
  • Assist the NHS in getting culturally appropriate messages about health across North Kensington.
  • Provide feedback on NHS services within North Kensington.

Next steps

Engagement over the last 12 months has shown that the initiative has been warmly received by the community who are keen to progress the work. This has helped us to identify potential Health Partners who have been invited to take part.

West London CCG is looking for more North Kensington organisations to come forward from the voluntary, community and faith sectors as well as resident associations to join with the NHS on our Health Partners Programme.

Want to get involved? We're looking to recruit more organisations to work with on the Health Partners Programme. If you'd like to get involved get in touch at nhsnwl.nkrt@nhs.net

We commissioned Professor Lucy Easthope to review the work of our Health Partners and this is the report she produced (May 2022).