Communicating and engaging in a new

environment

Claire Norman: Head of Communications and Engagement, GM

Health and Social Care Devolution

Nicola Onley: Head of Communications and Engagement, Bolton

CCG

Alan Higgins: Director of Public Health, Oldham Council

2

Greater Manchester: a snapshot picture

Vision

To ensure the greatest and fastest possible improvement to the health

and wellbeing of the 2.7 million citizens of Greater Manchester (GM)

By:

- Integrated governance: binding on all the partners, being decisive and bold

- Integrated planning: 10 aligned local plans feeding one GM strategic plan setting out

transformational ambitions

- Integrated delivery: best practice at pace and scale, locally sensitive but of regional

significance

This isn’t just about health

The health outcomes for GM residents are worse than those in other parts of the country. This

significance and complexity of the issues faces by our residents are wider ranging than just health and therefore requires integration of not just health and care, but contributing wider public services.

The communications and engagement challenge

• Eyes of the world

• Pace

• Newness

• Complexity of stakeholders (not just about health)

• Politics and “politics”

• Wrangling the (different) narratives

• Making the devolution link

• Telling the human story

• Point B unknown

• Resource

The opportunity

• To get behind a common vision

• To use the expertise and experience in the system - not a central

approach

• To use the partnerships we’ve got and work together

• To have a greater impact by doing things once

• To focus on people and place – not organisations

• To accept different approaches, mistakes and contribution

• To share and celebrate each other’s success to benefit GM

The solution - the how

Amsterdam - the bicycle capital of the world • The Netherlands boasts 22,000 miles of cycle paths.

• More than a quarter of all trips are made by bicycle, compared with 2% in the UK – and this rises to 38% in

Amsterdam and 59% in the university city of Groningen.

• All major Dutch cities have designated “bicycle civil

servants”, tasked to maintain and improve the network.

• And the popularity of the bike is still growing, thanks partly to the development of electric bicycles.

• Public health, reform and growth – making the most powerful case yet for the ‘economics

of prevention’ demonstrating the link between public health, employment and early

intervention outcomes

• Nurturing a social movement for change - enabling people to make their own informed

life-style choices and creating new platforms for full engagement of GM residents

• Starting well (early years) - the scaled implementation of the GM early years model to

improve school readiness and addressing long term determinants of public service demand

• Living well (work and health) - aligning public health intervention to wider public service

reform tackling complex dependency and supporting residents to be in sustainable and good

quality work

• Ageing well - setting up a Greater Manchester Ageing Hub to support age-friendly

communities and environments, and scaling work on dementia friendly communities,

supporting those with dementia to remain connected to their communities and in control of

their lives for as long as possible.

Public Health Memorandum of Understanding: five major

transformational programmes

Nurturing a social movement for change

• Intention - to nurture self-sustaining cultural change in favour of better health and wellbeing.

• Social movement - individuals being drawn into public debate over matters

of common concern, a source of creativity and they tend to create

identities, ideas and ideals.

• What are the characteristics of social movements?

Eight core characteristics of social movements

Radical actions: Public protest and the use of radical and unconventional means of

political persuasion; belief that change cannot be achieved within the

system, the system itself has to be changed; incremental change is not

enough

Transformative events: Major changes result from social movements rather than planned

programmes

Collective: Collective action driven by shared goals and/or common grievance

Voluntary: Spontaneous and self-organising

Organisation: Explode into life without being organised but if they are to stay in

existence they need central coordinating and resourcing

Political: Movement participants are invariably protestors seeking to influence

those in power to bring about change

Conflict and resistance: Polarisation can have a strong impact on bringing participants together;

resistance helps change happen, it is energising and points to the need

for something new

Durable: The kind of change movements pursue require some measure of

sustained, organised activity

Developing thoughts and discussion

• Nurturing a social movement - emphasise the creativity required from communities but we do want to retain the ability to shape the development of a social movement so that the outcome is a cultural change on health and wellbeing.

• Do we understand how to create a social movement for health and wellbeing?

• Could we better define what it would look like?

• Is it something that we should seek to control or better understand as a social phenomenon to which authorities can respond positively or negatively?

“How do we get a population

hungry for health and

actively participating in their

own health?”

Thank you for listening

Any questions?