Practical approaches to community cohesion

Different ways to develop your strategy

There are several ways in which Health bodies can address community cohesion. The important thing is to do the strategic thinking thoroughly and build it into whichever approach best suits the issues in your locality and the way you operate as an organisation. Remember, community cohesion issues vary enormously from place to place and can only be compiled on a highly localised basis. The ten challenging questions should help you to identify a number of key issues and priorities for action. These can then be developed through one of the following vehicles:

Develop a specific Community Cohesion Strategy for the Health sector which complements that of the wider partnership. This approach might be appropriate if cohesion is a particularly significant issue in your area and you want to send out strong messages to the community that you see it as a high priority.
Make sure your Equality and Diversity Strategy covers community cohesion by extending its scope if necessary. This approach might be more appropriate where you already have an established and successful Equality and Diversity Strategy but it needs to move from addressing the needs of individual patients to addressing community perceptions and aspirations.
Addressing community cohesion as part of your overall service strategy. This approach is about mainstreaming community cohesion. This is probably where you want to end up but you need to take care that cohesion does not get lost amongst many other issues.
Make sure you have the data and intelligence to provide an up to date analysis and understanding of the local community. This might be built up through the development of an information strategy or simply by ensuring that it is an essential part of any of the other three approaches.

Whichever approach you choose we would strongly advise you to work in close partnership with other agencies that are charged with responsibility for developing community cohesion in your area, particularly the Local Authority. Use the ten challenging questions to help you identify key issues and priorities and develop your strategy in the way that best suits your local circumstances. In part 8 of the guide we have provided some suggestions about how to build Community Cohesion issues and action plans into your management system. We identify seven key processes that need to be addressed:

These seven key processes can be used as a checklist for your strategic analysis whichever of the four approaches you choose to adopt.