The Creating Health Collaborative has published its first book. Communities Creating Health packages all of the articles from our recent series on Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), and includes a Foreword by Sir Harry Burns. It’s available from all online book stores, such as iBooks and all Amazon stores, including the UK, US and Canada.
While most of the content is already available online, and for free, some readers asked us to create an eBook so they could have a single source of all of the articles, together with the ability to add their own notes. We were happy to oblige and hope others also enjoy the benefit of having this unique series on their eReader, together with their scribbled reflections.
In parallel with creating the eBook, we have been working on a webinar, which is scheduled for November 17th, 2015 (11am–12noon PDT, 2pm–3pm EDT). Inspired by the response to the series, my co-editors, Bridget Kelly and Leigh Carroll, together with Stanford Social Innovation Review, have been hard at work deciding what to convey through a one-hour webinar. We wanted to build on the five guiding principles and nine concrete steps, which we shared in the final article of the series.
Entitled Organizing Communities To Create Health, the webinar will explore what it means for communities – including the institutions that serve them – to agree what makes people feel ‘healthier’. Doing so would not only enable us to see health as more than just a consequence of preventing harm or having diseases cured, but also something that communities can have an active part in creating. We believe active leadership by communities is key to the future of health and that health care must learn to share power with the people they serve to create more inclusive approaches to prioritising what matters, choosing the most feasible and useful projects, allocating resources, and generating new knowledge.
As with all our work (including the Collaborative’s meetings and the eBook), we’ve worked hard to ensure that we have different voices at the table. We’ll be hearing from Regina Stevens, a Health Educator with Birth Matters of South Carolina, Nayeli Chavez, an Associate Professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, and Mark Wieland, an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic. Our aim was to have voices from communities, academia and clinical practice, respectively. Bridget Kelly, Interim Director of the Board on Children, Youth and Families of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine will foreshadow their presentations with an overview of the topic. Both Mark and Bridget are members of the Creating Health Collaborative 2015.
We’re grateful to The California Endowment and Kaiser Permanente for financially supporting the webinar so that it’s free for all. We think this is especially important for community representatives who often operate with fewer resources than their peers in health care. Bridget, Leigh and I are also grateful to Stanford Social Innovation Review for not only, once again, providing a platform for our work but also seeing the importance of a deeper, more community-focussed conversation about health.
We’ve had a few people ask us about the Collaborative’s 2015 meeting, and whether there’ll be a report. We’re currently deciding what we actually want to achieve with a report. We’ve always been of the view that the job of work is to build a new (or revived, depending on how old you are) community of practice. What we’re not sure of yet is how a report will aid that journey. Rest assured, though, that we do intend to do some kind of report as we all feel that it’s only by sharing can this space grow. More on that soon.
We hope you enjoy the eBook, scribble copious notes, and share the authors’ insights with your peers and colleagues. We always wanted it to be practical and, in preparing it, I was reminded of many simple ideas that the authors shared from the front lines of a new way of delivering health. And we hope you join us for the webinar on November 17th, 2015.
