The Core Cities Health Improvement Collaborative Explained
The Core Cities Health Improvement Collaborative is approaching the half-way point in its two year scheme to tackle the major health inequalities facing England’s eight biggest regional cities.
So far, the 10 Primary Care Trusts based in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield have combined at three special learning events designed to promote greater collaboration and enhanced learning, and to develop future best practice on issues such as alcohol harm, all-age, all-cause early mortality and mental health and well being.
Three further events are planned for 2010, each focusing on a separate problem, including teenage pregnancy, obesity and smoking.
The focus on each topic area is initiated through a two-day conference which is carefully designed to promote effective learning and to act as a catalyst to further collaboration.
Senior PCT, local government and other public sector managers work together with a consortium of health and local government specialists to create programmes of work which not only improve practice but which create more effective health improvement strategies.
A review of the group’s most recent event – held in Birmingham and focused on Mental Health and Well being – can be found here.
Forthcoming Events
Further details of the forthcoming event on Teenage Pregnancy, which is due to be hosted in Nottingham on January 25 and 26, 2010, can be found here.
Meanwhile, planning for the Collaborative’s fifth event – to be held in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, looking at Obesity – is currently underway.
The final event in the current programme will focus on Smoking.
To find out more about the Teenage Pregnancy event, or to register an interest in other forthcoming conferences, please contact CCHIC project administrator, Graham Goldsworthy, on 01454 218900 or GGoldsworthy@finnamore.co.uk.
Continued Collaboration
Having laid the groundwork for future collaboration, CCHIC is looking to improve the quality of partnership working and learning through continued collaboration. One of the ways this is being done is through the introduction of a powerful partnership working and knowledge management tool called OpenStrategy. The OpenStrategy mechanism helps participants “liberate the collective wisdom” of internal and external stakeholders by:
- concisely mapping existing activities and/or new ideas in the simplest possible way either as individual ideas or as inter-linked SubStrategies to enable the cities to clearly demonstrate and share best practice
- explicitly showing how projects lead to benefits, with in many cases, single projects creating multiple benefits and/or multiple projects being required to lead to single benefits
- enabling SubStrategies to be refined and prioritised at any time allowing partners to focus on certain aspects of the overall agenda
- identifying “orphan” results – results that are undoubtedly useful but don’t add value in this particular context
- providing a common framework that enables organisations across all cities to share ideas within a common language and structure
Having worked together to learn from other cities and develop joint action plans, event participants will soon be able to use the web-based tool to find details of other cities’ successful projects, assess which have been most successful and how, and to identify which aspects of each programme have driven their success.