This blog is to introduce new readers to the ‘All Our Health’ call to action for health and care professionals (HCPs), to provide an update to those who are already aware and to say thank you for colleagues who have worked with us to develop the approach and resources. Our second blog sets out what you told us and how we have used your feedback.
What is All Our Health?
It is a PHE led ‘Call to Action’ for all health and care professionals to embed and extend prevention, health protection and promotion of wellbeing and resilience into practice. All Our Health provides a framework and tools and resources to support this ‘health promoting practice’ with quick links to evidence and impact measures and top tips on what works.
Why do we need All Our Health?
Because it is time to get serious about prevention! It is time for health and care professionals to act to make a difference! As health and care professionals we have relationships with individual people, families and communities and reach across all ages and all places. This means that there is a huge opportunity ‘for health promoting practice’ to make a difference to health outcomes and health inequalities. In addition acting collectively we can be a force for change in building a culture of health in our society.
Where does All Our Health fit?
- The Five Year Forward View (5YFV) set out the prevention challenge to ‘close the health and wellbeing gap’ and ‘radically upgrade prevention,’ which means working with people and communities to develop health resilience, enhance wellbeing and support self-care. All Our Health has been aligned to support these ambitions.
- The NHS prevention board support All Our health as a contribution to the radical upgrade required, making evidence and impact measures more easily accessible and relevant and promoting collective action.
- Health improvement campaigns and programmes: All Our Health is now aligned with Making Every Contact Count (MECC), NHS Health Checks, Health Matters and public facing health campaigns: with PHE teams to improve alignment between public campaigns for health, and information for health care professionals to ensure that we have up to date information to support and reinforce campaigns One You, ‘Clear on cancer’ and ‘Start for Life’ and ‘Change for Life’
- Health care professional role development and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and (where relevant revalidation) HCPs have opportunity and responsibility to have an impact on outcomes through prevention at individual, community and population levels. All Our Health has therefore been developed in conjunction with nurses and midwives (forming the first three commitment in the new national framework ‘leading Change Adding Value’), AHPs, dental, pharmacy and public health organisations and with education colleagues to support role development and CPD.
- new care models and new professional roles are developing to meet the challenges of modern healthcare and All Our Health can contribute to this development.
- Supporting a healthy workforce (link to NHS Employers support)
Why a call to action?
We have heard from many health and care staff that they understand and support the drive to ‘prevent, protect, promote,’ but are not sure how to make this happen. All Our Health sets out ‘how’ and provides the tools to build on and increase our professional skills and confidence to make a difference to individual and population health. All Our Health calls for:-
- Action By – being part of the creation of a social movement for health. HCPs can action this by being visible on prevention, being a collective vibrant force for change to building a ‘culture of health’ in our society through their Making Every Contact Count to empower people about their own health and supporting asset based community development
- Action Through – being champions of prevention, using clinical and care relationships to help people to make healthy life choices and to supporting resilience and independence through self-care and management, by responding to local population health needs contributing to local service planning and delivery
- Action On – closing the health and wellbeing gap and reducing inequalities. We need to take action on our own health and to support our staff, to understand and use the best evidence for practice and to develop metrics which demonstrate the impact of our contribution to protect and improve the health of the population
All health and care professionals can make practical interventions as part of their daily interaction with those they care for by supporting health, wellbeing and resilience throughout the lifecourse, creating healthy places, and measured through the Public Health Outcomes Framework.
What is available to support the call to action and ‘health promoting practice’?
- An All Our Health overview presentation to further help explain and visualize the principles and scope
- All Our Health ‘Collections Page’ has been set up on Gov.uk to bring all the current tools and some new ones in development into one place.
All Our Health Topic guides on public health challenges where health promoting practice can make a real difference. These have been developed following considerable engagement with stakeholders and other experts and provide practical interventions for healthcare professionals to impact on.
We have (hyperlinked), or will shortly be, publishing the following topics:
- All Our Health: about the framework
- Healthy Beginnings
- Early Adolescence
- Smoking and tobacco
- Adult Obesity
- Childhood obesity
- Alcohol
- Sexual and Reproductive Health and HIV
- Falls
- AMR
- Tuberculosis
- Pressure ulcers
- Respiratory health
- Liver Disease
- Dementia
- Homelessness
- Learning Disabilities
- Wellbeing in Mental Health
- Workplace Health
Please take the time to explore what is on offer and join us in creating a social movement for health.You can follow and promote on Twitter with #AllOurHealth
Here are two short videos where I explain further the thinking behind and ambitions for All Our Health: Link to part one; link to part two
Here’s what our professional leads say about All Our Health!
Jamie Waterall, Associate Deputy Chief Nurse and National Lead for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Public Health England, said:
‘I regularly speak with health and care professionals who buy into the need for a radical upgrade in prevention but are less certain of the role they can play. All Our Health is therefore an excellent framework for professional colleagues to consider their contribution to priority public health programmes. This framework provides a great resource to learn and, more importantly, be actively involved in England’s response to getting serious about prevention.’
Gul Root, Lead Pharmacist at Public Health England, said:
‘All Our Health is a great addition to the education tool set supporting pharmacy professionals to be more effective in their public health work. Especially for the nearly two and a half thousand Healthy Living Pharmacies, who are reaching out to local communities providing health information and support on a daily basis to improve their health from our local high streets, supermarkets and shopping centres, alongside those in acute and other primary care clinical settings.’
Linda Hindle, Lead AHP at Public Health England, said:
‘87% of allied health professionals (AHPs) say that public health is a core part of their professional practice. All Our Health provides a one stop shop for evidence based messages and interventions relevant to AHPs wherever they work.’
Sandra White, National Lead for Dental Public Health at Public Health England, said:
“All Our Health enables us to support dental healthcare professionals by providing a single point of access to oral health improvement resources. This section is currently under development with an oral health section going live in the autumn”
Anthony Kessel, Director of Global Public Health at Public Health England, said:
“All Our Health provides a fantastic resource to enhance personal and collective contributions to improvement of the public’s health. This vital opportunity is as important for global health work as it is domestically in this country.“
Survey
Now we need you to help us please. We have created a short survey to allow you to tell us what you think about All Our Health and to allow us to continue to develop it to fit your needs. Therefore, if you could take some time to explore and utilise the resources available through All Our Health and then a take a few minutes to undertake this survey and tell us what you think. The survey will be available until 28th August 2016 and can be accessed via this link: Go to All Our Health Survey
2 comments
Comment by Claire French posted on
All Our Health ; what an amazing amount of useful information all in one place. So useful in my role as a school nurse to help support the health needs of young people.
Comment by STEPHANIE GILLIES posted on
Keep Learning to improve & change.