In 2023, the Mid Essex Alliance, a partnership of NHS colleagues, district councils, emergency services, voluntary and community sector partners, education and county council representatives, asked Centre for Thriving Places (CTP) to help them find a joint approach for tackling health inequalities and focus on wider determinants of health.
The Alliance – one of four statutory partnerships of the Mid and South Essex Integrated Care Board region – wanted to use the Thriving Places index and framework to help weave together their areas of work, budgets, priorities and outcomes into a shared framework. A strong data and evidence based approach for deciding how to focus resources of the Integrated partnership in their area was a priority.
‘It’s helping the region to have different kinds of conversations’
Tristan Easey, Health and Wellbeing Manager at Braintree District Council.
CTP worked with partners to develop a bespoke version of the Thriving Places dataset for their area, to help shape a Mid Essex Alliance framework. It was clear that some domains of the Thriving Places framework were already being tackled jointly across subject areas, and that other areas would really benefit from a similarly joined up approach. The Alliance worked with CTP to develop four ‘spotlight’ domains for closer partnership focus, and using the Thriving Places dataset to build ‘baskets’ of indicators to support collaborative working. For example, ‘healthy housing’ would include indicators on housing quality and affordability, energy use, respiratory health and other health conditions.
The Thriving Places dataset made it easy to see discrepancies in how people were experiencing conditions necessary to thrive. District councils started to use the Thriving Places framework to view priorities in a different way, such as spending their UK Shared Prosperity (UKSP) funding, developing their own corporate plans and other strategies.
CTP came back to Mid Essex for a further year, to work alongside colleagues across the three districts to develop demonstration projects, build a framework approach into local systems and build local capacity.
‘We can get people to exert huge willpower and eat more healthily but it will fail if they can’t afford to shop healthily, and are surrounded by cheap fast food takeaways. To reduce obesity in a place we have to make that place a thriving place’
Adrian Coggins, Head of Health and Wellbeing, Essex County Council.
If you want to find out more about how Centre for Thriving Places can help you transform your place to deliver for people and the planet, get in touch at hello@