1st Edition
Creating Community Health Interventions for Sustainable Healthcare
This important book explores how community-based interventions can bridge the gap between health services and the voluntary sector to create more sustainable, healthy communities.
Moving beyond a technologically driven, medicalised approach to healthcare, the book shows how social prescribing can provide a direct pathway to improving community health, embracing connection and challenging inequality. Written by a practicing GP, and illustrated through practical guidance, it demonstrates how this can offer a cost-effective, preventative means to improving health outcomes, enabling communities to be more resilient when confronting major issues such as climate change or pandemics.
Building to a case study of how these methods were used in one town, Ross-on-Wye, the book will be invaluable reading for those working in healthcare, public health, local authorities, and the voluntary sector, as well as students and researchers interested in these areas.
Introduction
1. Community health
2. Heath and its determinants
3. Disorders of society
4. Healthcare structures
5. Prescribing society
6. Social prescriptions
7. Social infrastructure
8. COVID-19
9. Planetary health
10. Sustainable policy
11. Developing community
Further resources
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Biography
Dr Simon Lennane has been a GP in Ross-on-Wye for twenty years. Simon was Clinical Director of the local Primary Care Network during the pandemic, responsible for urgent care and vaccination clinics, and was also clinical lead for mental health commissioning. Simon published research into ethnicity and deaths of healthcare workers from COVID-19. He has long been involved with community development in the town, and was a founder trustee of Ross Community Development Trust, which supports the local voluntary sector.
Twitter: @SimonLennane. Mastodon: @[email protected]
"Social prescribing is critical to addressing the health of all patients. Traditional medicine covers at best 20% of their needs, and has significant side effects and risks. This book explores how developing communities facilitates lifestyle changes to improve population health."
-Sir Sam Everington, GP, Bromley By Bow Centre.
"Simon Lennane’s book is a treasury of resources of the profound effect of community building on healthcare and beyond, to the future of our planet. The magic of communities has the potential to transform our world and Creating Community Health shows how this can be done."
-Dr Julian Abel, Director of Compassionate Communities UK and co-author of 'The Compassion Project'.
