Improvement Science meets Community Development: Approaching Health Inequalities through Community Engagement

Abstract

The Improvement Foundation's Healthy Communities Collaborative (HCC) model combines community development and quality improvement, lay knowledge and professional support in an innovative community‐led approach aimed specifically at reducing health inequalities. This paper describes the key characteristics of the model and uses an outcomes framework to discuss indicative results from an HCC initiative to promote earlier identification of people at risk of cardiovascular disease, implemented in nine spearhead local authorities.

Citation

Slater, B., Knowles, J. and Lyon, D. (2008), "Improvement Science meets Community Development: Approaching Health Inequalities through Community Engagement", Journal of Integrated Care, Vol. 16 No. 6, pp. 26-36. https://doi.org/10.1108/14769018200800043