Livewell Southwest joined local partners in Plymouth to launch the latest of the city’s planned 12 Wellbeing Hubs.
The new Four Greens Wellbeing Hub was officially launched by partners including Plymouth City Council, NHS Northern, Eastern and Western Devon Clinical Commissioning Group, and the Four Greens Community Trust, which is hosting the Hub.
The launch comes just a week after a visit from Claire Murdoch, National Director for Mental Health at NHS England, who visited the city’s first Wellbeing Hub at the Jan Cutting Centre for Healthy Living, run by the Wolseley Trust.
A dozen Wellbeing Hubs will open across neighbourhoods over the next two years as part of an initiative designed to focus on prevention and make services easier to access in neighbourhoods.
The Wellbeing Hubs scheme has four main aims, which are to improve the health and wellbeing outcomes for local people, reduce inequalities in health and wellbeing, improve people’s experience of care and improve the sustainability of the health and wellbeing system.
- From patients to people – the hubs will be designed to engage with people recognising they have strengths and assets and with support can achieve outcomes without being viewed as patients who need things doing to them
- From care settings to places and communities – the hubs will be a place and community based offer and will help to develop communities that care
- From what’s the matter with you to what matters to you – the plan is to focus on the assets of individuals and build on that to achieve the things they want to achieve
- From illness management to wellness support – the focus is on prevention and wellbeing
One of the key services the Wellbeing Hubs will provide is social prescribing, for when people have an issue that is affecting their wellbeing but don’t require medical help – this could be problems with loneliness, debt, relationship difficulties, and many other issues.
Dr Adam Morris, chief executive of Livewell Southwest, said: “The development of a network of hubs is central to our aim of supporting people to remain safe, well and at home. The hubs bring together a wide range of support and advice services, easily accessed in the communities where people live, enabling people to make healthy choices and improve their quality of life.”
Councillor Ian Tuffin, Cabinet Member for Health and Adult Social Care, said: “We want to prevent ill health and help residents to take better care of themselves. We want to provide more support in the city’s neighbourhoods so that everyone, from babies to pensioners, can lead longer, happier and healthier lives.”
Dr Ruth Harrell, Plymouth’s Director of Public Health, said: “We want to make sure that people can access local services that will help them to improve their health and wellbeing, whether that is through support with debt, feeling more involved with their community, or being more active.”
Mark Rowles, vice-chair of Four Greens, said: “We are all trying to do the same thing with limited amounts of money, and what we are about is trying to support that process and create a community that feels proud of itself.” Second Health and Wellbeing Hub launched in Plymouth
Tina Adams who uses the Four Greens centre, said: “It’s been a life changing thing for me, not just the help to manage my money. We need to get more people coming here, because the more people that come in here and realise they can have their life changed as well, the better, there’s so many activities to do and friends to make.”
