Mobilising Community Assets (MCA) to Tackle Health Inequalities: Phase 2 Projects
Author: Dr Rodney J Reynolds
Takeaway:
Cross-cultural consortia can successfully help reduce health inequalities in communities across the UK by combining existing community assets for health and developing others to address wider health determinants at the scale of the community and neighbourhood.
4 Key Messages:
- Active and ongoing economic investment in community based organisations active in the health sector, broadly defined, generate positive environments for increasing health knowledge and engagement across all age ranges, genders, classes and ethnicities and demonstrate that community assets can become health assets;
- The 16 MCA funded Phase 2 projects have identified and strengthened existing health assets in communities, characterised by divergent socio-demographic indicators, through employing a broad range of successfully co-designed and co-produced methods and activities in partnership with community-based lived experience experts;
- Building effective consortia to reduce health inequalities requires enhanced collaboration and commitment to community engagement over sufficiently long time frames for trust to develop among consortia partners;
- Improved health equality results from people’s greater access to health resources via community assets because doing so encourages collaboration among non-traditional health services to shape the social and wider health determinants to local scale, thereby exerting positive effects on the health of community members.
Introduction:
Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities is a UK-wide research programme funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, in partnership with the National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH). Phase 2 of the programme funded 16 projects over 2023 that aimed to build cross-sectoral community research consortia to address health inequalities. At the end of 2024, the MCA team and its partner NCCH, published a report about the Phase 2 projects, available here: https://ncch.org.uk/uploads/MCA_Phase-2_Case_Study_Synthesis.pdf that details the factors that enabled these projects to succeed and impact thousands across the UK.
The Phase 2 community projects incorporated academic, health, local authority, community and lived experience partners across a range of settings and worked in some of the most economically challenged areas of the UK. The positive health effects created by Phase 2 projects continue to reverberate as Phase 3 of the Mobilising Community Assets programme gets underway. More about Phase 3 here: https://ncch.org.uk/news/mobilising-community-assets-phase-3-projects-announced.
This short blog post revisits the Phase 2 projects, some of which continue into Phase 3, to underscore the fact that resource pooling, collaboration and trust building create the conditions for more people to have easier access to the health assets and resources that exist within their neighbourhoods and communities.
Phase 2 Project Objectives
Phase 2 projects demonstrate an effective strategy for designing new health ecosystems. By organising existing community assets and resources to address the varied health needs that communities have, health services can become responsive at the level of communities and in the neighbourhoods in which people live. This makes it easier to identify how vulnerability emerges and helps decision and policy makers target resources more effectively. Achieving such positive results requires identifying and mapping existing community assets while also developing others. This work happens by building multidisciplinary partnerships that enhance community assets and by shaping social and wider resources for health.
Aside from responding to the ‘social and wider health determinants’, which demonstrate that healthfulness mostly develops (or falters) where people live and enjoy recreation and not in medical clinics, Phase 2 projects align with the UK focus of reimagining the NHS around prevention and local services delivery. Via Integrated Care Systems (ICS) structures, the community assets for health that Phase 2 projects have individually and collectively brought together address health at a local scale by way of multidisciplinary, community level collaborations.
“Factors that supported the project are predominantly the passion and commitment of the various stakeholders, their willingness to work together and the ideas that emerged from regular meetings and discussions. Maintaining the enthusiasm of the coalition can be a challenge, particularly in the midst of various threats to their own organisations.” Argues one of the project participants.
The Fylde Coast Research Consortium as one example of a Phase 2 project identified the community needs of groups who live along the coast and improved their access to services through workshops and knowledge exchange events. Applied social network analysis and community mapping resulted in enhanced collaboration among health and social care providers. The Pathways to health through cultures of neighborhoods project developed methods for successful outreach to young-people and how to involve them in decision-making. This project in Southampton has managed to influence policy by establishing a research and knowledge exchange structure that embraces and leverages lived experience and local knowledge.
Phase 2 Projects Outcomes
Phase 2 projects generated positive evidence that cross-cultural groups across a range of community stakeholders can help reduce health inequalities. They achieved this outcome by linking existing community assets and by establishing collaborations with a diverse range of partners. Phase 2 follows on from completed Phase 1 projects, which began in January 2022, and consisted of 12-month pilot projects. These focused on how to scale up small, local approaches to addressing health inequalities. Available at: https:// ncch.org.uk/uploads/MCA-Case-Study-Synthesis.pdf
Phase 2 projects helped create the conditions for their own success and acceptance by stakeholders. By mapping and building on existing community assets for health, new community grounded health resources that prioritise accessibility and community needs can be built. Effective economic investment in model programmes can generate sustainable, scalable and acceptable health infrastructure for and with communities that will help reduce health inequities. Capacity building results in learning about and being responsive to community health needs. This work requires energy and willingness to practice care and to build equitable structures.
“Of enormous help was the use of hard facts – data that we gathered from our ADR-UK studies on physical health of people with SMI - which demonstrates the issues in stark terms and is often the only information to which the government and policy makers will pay attention.” Offered another Phase 2 project.
Conclusion
Further field research ought to be undertaken to describe and analyse project methods and assumptions since projects reported a broad range of approaches to consortia building and how community assets respond to health needs and potentially produce new health assets. Given that a number of projects identified the issue of maintaining their collaborations as a key challenge, further work could explore how this is addressed in an ongoing, sustainable way.
Since health issues manifest in integrated communities of people, so too do the assets that can effectively address many of the health challenges people in local communities face. Funded projects evidenced why and how they meet the needs of local stakeholders and reach target groups and communities, especially the most vulnerable. The qualitative factors of building on existing relationships, and harnessing enthusiasm mattered for creating successful programmes in Phase 2 as much if not more than strategic alignments for data and evidence generation. None the less, building effective response and feedback channels for policy and implementation remain a core activity for success.
