Blogs from Gillian Orrow

Growing Health Together is an initiative supporting the NHS to collaborate with people and partners to improve the conditions for health and wellbeing in neighbourhoods across East Surrey. It began as a grassroots collaboration between GPs, their patients and local partners outside of the NHS and was commissioned by NHS Surrey Heartlands in December 2020. Growing Health Together is hosted by Alliance for Better Care.

Health: Supporting physical, social and mental health for people of all ages and backgrounds

Equity: Enhancing access to health-giving opportunities, such as movement, social connection and nature connection

Sustainability: Reducing waste and supporting a healthy natural environment, recognising this is critical to human health.

How we work

Growing Health Together supports the establishment of trusted relationships between the NHS, local communities, local authorities, charities, schools, businesses, farms and other partners within neighbourhoods across East Surrey. Each area is working on different projects to support health and wellbeing but common principles of work in each area include:

• Identifying existing health and wellbeing opportunities, outside of the health service, within each locality, and highlighting them to NHS staff and patients so that more people might benefit.
• Listening to local people’s views on the sources of and barriers to health in their communities.
• Supporting and enabling community members to lead their own health creation activities.
• Facilitating collaboration between citizens and local organisations in order to co-create better conditions for health and wellbeing in our communities, and to drive improvements in NHS services.