Transition as Social Medicine One of the following quotes comes from the Transition movement. The other 4 come from public health professionals. Can you tell which is which? A: A sustainable system protects and improves health within environmental and social resources now and for future generations. This means reducing carbon emissions, minimising waste and pollution, building resilience to climate change and nurturing community strengths. B: We need a new vision of cooperative and democratic action at all levels of society and a new principle of planetism and wellbeing for every person on this Earth - a principle that asserts that we must conserve, sustain, and make resilient the planetary and human systems on which health depends by giving priority to the wellbeing of all. C: Changing light bulbs, sharing cars and flying a little less is not going to get us to these targets.They are all necessary actions to take now, necessary but NOT sufficient. We need a radically low carbon society (and a health service to match – which will mean that health care will need to be delivered in radically different ways) D: Our wellbeing is determined to a greater extent by our community assets than any other health and well being determinants. However, community building rarely features as a priority in the current sickness model. But that’s all about to change because more and more health care radicals are shifting their focus from what’s wrong to what’s strong Actually its a trick question, because none of them come from Transition writings at all. In order, they come from the NHS Sustainable Development Strategy, The Lancet, British Medical Journal and Cormac Russell of Nurture Development. Hard to tell though, huh? This month we have been exploring the overlap between Transition and public health, and arguing that in many ways they could be seen as being one and the same thing. Lets get a quick snapshot of some of the things that Transition groups do, from our latest monthly roundup: creating new community markets to bring local food into communities, mobilising people to come out and recreate their bus stops as Edible Bus Stops where people can graze while they wait for the bus, running energy festivals where people can learn how to save energy and more about renewables, putting up polytunnels in schools, trying to support their local traders to become plastic bag-free, setting up community energy companies and projects, enabling skillshares, planting community orchards, organising river bank clean-ups, fixing local bikes, planning developments of affordable homes built with local materials, running repair cafes and so on. I think theres a strong case that we could look at all of those as being public health. Mark Dooris and the way in which the delivery organisations are still set up now in local authorities still doesn’t help that. I think it is a real challenge and the way in which the delivery organisations are still set up now in local authorities still doesn’t help that. I think there is interest in what’s termed social prescribing, where rather than looking at prescribing medication a good example that links up with Transition agendas is the green gym, where people are doing environmental conservation, horticultural work and that’s actually seen and evidenced to have positive impacts both in terms of physical activity and mental health and wellbeing. And for instance, my team is leading work across North West prisons where that green gym approach has developed. We’ve got strong horticultural work where car parks are being turned into gardens with polytunnels. But I think the other structure that’s potentially really interesting is Health and Wellbeing Boards. They have a role in developing overarching health and wellbeing strategies for the local authority areas. Again I think what we need to be doing is identifying areas where there really is that interest and engagement to join things up and to have a brave vision so that they can almost be seen as pilot areas to develop new ways of thinking and articulating how we could move forward. Perhaps some of the reservations that some people in public health would have if I was to talk to them about Transition would be firstly around the extent to which it’s successfully embraced a commitment to equity, social justice and diversity, and I think that’s something which has had more and more discussion in the last few years in a really positive way. What would it look like? I think what it would look like is that actually we’d have something that was a lot more seamless, that we’d have health being seen as a core value and function within delivery organisations. We’d have that being seen as intricately related to and interconnected with other agendas rather than separate from them. I think we’d have a really balanced focus on acknowledging that there are very real needs and problems out there but ther... buff.ly/1kHMa…
Posted on: Wed, 28 May 2014 17:51:03 +0000
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