Sheffield Flourish honoured to win New NHS Alliance Award
On December 6th we were honoured to win the New NHS Alliance’s Excellence in Health Creation Award for ‘Getting Our 5-a-day’. It was a real achievement for our community, and fantastic to be recognised by this organisation.
The New NHS Alliance describes itself as ‘a values-led movement of people and organisations committed to building a sustainable, community-based health service’. In 2017 they launched their ‘Manifesto for Health Creation’, which detailed the ‘five features of health creating practice’
- Listening and responding
- Truth-telling
- Strengths focus
- Self-organising
- Power-shifting
Here’s a lovely video if you’d like to find out more:
We certainly strive to live these principles in everything we do, which is why we were so pleased to be awarded this prize.
We were particularly happy to hear a wide range of speakers at the Action Summit (which preceded the prizegiving) cover an issue which is really important to us: health inequality. CEO of Public Health England Duncan Selbie was eloquent on the issue, arguing that: “the idea that the more we invest in healthcare the more we will improve the health of the people is not true”. His point was that despite having health services free at the point of use for nearly 70 years huge health inequalities persist – which clearly indicates that health is affected by a variety of factors. To solve health inequalities, therefore, you need to consider more than just health. We share this view: fostering community, purpose, and creativity are all incredibly effective ways to approach solving health inequalities and are often more effective than anything medicalised.
More than anything, the day reminded us of the power of our community to bring about change. We’re a tiny charity with a tiny staff team, but we have a growing network of people with skills, nous, vision and experience who have helped us build and continue to help us shape our work. It’s this that brought our tiny charity on the train down to London to accept the award! Thank you everyone.
And here we are with the award (being photobombed!):
– Jo Eckersley, Sheffield Flourish
