Addressing health inequalities

To progress our ambition, we must work together to understand the root causes of health inequalities and adopt an approach that looks at everyone in our communities.

This will help us to identify the needs of our local population and align our health services to address these. In order to achieve this, it is important that we listen and hear what matters to our communities.

In October 2021, Guildford and Waverley Alliance and our partners went out into the community and engaged with residents in the north Guildford Primary Care Network area over a period of 12 weeks.

Our plan was to engage residents in a different conversation, gain a better understanding of what matters to them and identify what was impacting their health and wellbeing. Four simple questions were asked:

• What makes you happy?
• What makes your life harder?
• If you had a magic wand, what would you do to improve your life?
• If you had a magic wand, what would you do to improve the area you live in?

The results showed that friends and family are what make people the happiest, while finance and debt were highlighted as the main issue making people’s lives harder.

Next steps

Using insights from the feedback we received will enable us to work with the community to co-design solutions that empower residents to be at the heart of engagement and to tackle health inequalities in the area. Engagement events have been held throughout 2022 to support the community and gain a better understanding of the challenges being faced.

The events held so far are:

• My Money Matters (March 2022)
• Population Health Management data Hackathon (April 2022)
• Population survey (June to October 2022)