Southampton Healthy Living

Local Social Enterprise to lead new approach to improve the health of Southampton residents.

A group of local organisations has won a bid to deliver health improvement and behaviour change services across the city of Southampton. The group will be led by Social Care in Action (SCA) Group working in partnership with Solent NHS Trust and Southampton Voluntary Services (SVS).

By working together across the city we hope to improve the health and wellbeing of people who live and work in Southampton in a number of ways. The new approach will make it easier for people to find out about ways to make changes to their lives to stay as fit and healthy for as long as possible. We also will be making it easier for people to get support with improving their health – taking part in regular exercise or stopping smoking are just a couple of examples.

SCA Group, Solent NHS Trust and SVS have worked together to develop an innovative approach to delivering the service. This new delivery model led to the consortia becoming finalists in the Third Sector Care Awards 2016 held in early December for Contribution to Sector Development.

Ruth Marriott, CEO for SCA Group said:

‘We are delighted to have been awarded the contract for delivering this service. We have been delivering care and wellbeing services to the people of Southampton for over 25 years and our expertise and local knowledge puts us in a great place to lead this work.

Improving the health and wellbeing of our communities is one of our main priorities, and as we are a not-for-profit organisation the public can be assured that we will be investing every penny possible into helping them improve lives.’

Councillor Dave Shields, Cabinet Member for Health at Southampton City Council, said:

 ‘We face many challenges in the city in the battle against long term conditions like diabetes, respiratory illness and heart disease. It’s really important that prevention becomes everyone’s business and not seen as the sole responsibility of any one particular agency; we all have an important part to play as active citizens, good neighbours, caring parents or responsible employers and I want to make sure that the city council, the local NHS and the city’s voluntary sector continue to work together to promote a healthy city.”

Alex Whitfield, Solent NHS Trust’s Chief Operating Officer, said:

 ‘We are thrilled to be part of the winning partnership bid to deliver behaviour change services across Southampton. Our partnership with SCA and SVS will provide innovative models of behaviour change across the city and will integrate our current behaviour change and health promotion offer. This is an exciting opportunity to strengthen our relationship with our local community in conjunction with the voluntary sector and make a huge difference to the people of Southampton.’

Jo Ash, CEO of SVS said:

 ‘As a partner in this exciting new service model SVS is delighted to be delivering community development work and a small grants programme for local grassroots voluntary organisations which will support local people through a holistic approach to behaviour change rooted in community participation and active engagement of individual and volunteers.’

The new service will start at the beginning of April 2017. We firmly belive that by providing health promotion and wellbeing services of the highest quality to individuals across Southampton we can also have an impact on the health and wellbeing of whole communities.