Post by NHS Horizons

The train disruptions nor the hail stopped us exploring how we get over 11-million people more active! Recently we were in Manchester facilitating an event for our around 140 colleagues from across the country looking at how to empower healthy communities alongside Sport England & Active Partnerships. ✨ The goal > how can we draw out a ‘golden thread’ from national strategy and policy through to local activation?! How did we do this? A lot of discussion, post-it notes, coffee and some pretty amazing art work! Ably facilitated by our very own Sasha Karakusevic, we began by hearing about the shifting national picture from Jeanelle de Gruchy OBE, Sarah Price, Adam Rigarlsford, and Hussain Al-Zubaidi, covering: ✅ Health Inequalities  ✅ 4 Ways Forward  ✅ Devolution ✅ Neighbourhood Health from a primary care perspective   ✅ Sport England's organisational change 📖 Then it was story time with Warren Heppolette of Greater Manchester Combined Authority, who did a fantastic job of explaining their grassroots approach. Not so much top down, but Manchester has focused on bottom up, with neighbourhoods at its core. With “Live well” as a primary objective, Warren described how they fundamentally have been rethinking public services. Throughout the day we were treated to the incredibly fast sketch notes. Check those out in the images below 👇 With a lot less artistry but equal importance, attendees also plotted out their thoughts on what they saw as national shifts on our Activation Wall (told you there were a lot of post-its!). We then broke out into groups exploring clinical to community pathways with Michelle Long, the Health & Growth Accelerator work with our own Tom Underwood & the impact of story telling with Scott Hartley at Press Red Ltd, Moving Together with Sarah Worbey, Rob McLean and Sofia C. and how physical activity fits into obesity management with Hussain Al-Zubaidi. Moving on to a barstool session in the afternoon with a range of speakers, we asked how has place partnership investment acted as a catalyst for connecting with other neighbourhood health level initiatives and investments? Finally we ended with G & T 🍸 The T being Tom Burton and G Graeme Sinnott! Both gave us their final reflections of the day. This perhaps summed it up all: "We're in the business of change. But the heart of that is the relationships, how we connect and collaborate" 🤗