Ministerial Task Force on Health Inequalities: report 2013

6. Annex A - Principles of Equally Well

Equally Well was informed by the shared features of the social policy frameworks, and set out some key defining principles that would be its focus:

• Improving the whole range of circumstances and environments that offer opportunities to improve people's life circumstances and hence their health and other beneficial outcomes.
• Reducing people's exposure to factors in the physical and social environment that cause stress, are damaging to health and wellbeing, and lead to health and other inequalities.
• Recognising the particular importance of children's very early life experiences in shaping future health, social, learning and lifestyle outcomes.
• Prioritising early intervention - to break into recurring cycles, including poverty, unemployment, low skills, and poor health, and to prevent crises and problems requiring extensive responses from public services.
• Engaging individuals, families and communities most at risk of poor health in services and decisions relevant to their health, and promoting clear ownership of the issues by all involved.
• Building the capacity of individuals, families and communities to manage better in the longer term, moving from welfare to wellbeing and dependency to self-determination.
• Providing effective routes for individuals out of poverty and other life circumstances and lifestyles likely to get in the way of positive wellbeing, health and other good outcomes.
• Using government policy when it is helpful to set universal regulation or national services in place to reduce inequalities.
• Developing a "shared outcomes" approach to local delivery of the relevant public services, in which action likely to work in achieving longer term outcomes is shared between partner agencies, supported by sound internal performance management, public reporting and a cycle of continuous improvement.
• Promoting an investment approach to the best use of public sector resources, based on the business case for shifting resources over time to prevention and underlying causes of social problems, rather than dealing with the consequences of those problems.
• Improving alignment of the relevant resources across public services managed by different agencies.
• Shifting priorities, towards the use of mainstream public sector budgets to address inequalities and underlying causes and away from discrete project funding.
• Delivering health and other services that are both universal and appropriately prioritised to meet the needs of those most at risk of poor health and other outcomes, and that seek to prevent problems arising, as well as addressing them if they do.
• Transforming and redesigning the spectrum of local public services, so that they respond well collectively to people who need multiple forms of support, and who may not currently be getting a productive response from these services, because of the complexity of their needs.
• Ensuring we have a flexible workforce with the right skills, able to work effectively together across organisational boundaries and adapt their approach depending on the individual needs of service users.
• Basing current and future action on the available evidence and adding to that evidence for the future, through introducing new policies and interventions in ways which allow for evaluating progress and success.
• Ensuring that the range of actions we take now will achieve both short and long-term impact and will address foreseeable future challenges.