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Ten challenging questions to help you to contribute to community cohesion

Introduction

In this part of the report we set out ten challenging questions that can be used by health bodies to stimulate thinking about how you can contribute to community cohesion (and how your approach to community cohesion can help in improving performance in the delivery of health services). The ten questions were generated by a discussion between iCoCo and a group of health planners and practitioners in the North West region, led by Dominic Harrison and supported by Dr Sheila Marsh and representatives from health bodies, Common Ground North West and a team from Lancaster University. The group will soon be publishing the ten questions in the form of a guide to help health bodies in the North West to develop their own approaches to community cohesion and the work is being developed further through a series of action learning sets focusing on specific projects. We are grateful to the group (particularly Sabir Hussain and Gulab Singh MBE) who have encouraged the use of the ten questions as part of this national guide and for their help in developing the guide. The ten questions focus on the key areas of activity through which you can have the greatest impact on community cohesion. These are as follows:

  1. Leadership and partnership
  2. Promoting positive relationships between people from different backgrounds
  3. Achieving positive interactions for all
  4. Engaging with all communities
  5. Locating services, creating public spaces
  6. Involving suppliers and service providers
  7. Promoting cohesion, equality and diversity and countering myths
  8. Using information to understand change
  9. Investing in your people
  10. Promoting NHS jobs to all communities

For each of the ten questions the following commentary is provided:

  • An explanation of why the question is important. 
  • A set of more specific 'self assessment questions' to help you use the ten questions as a means of assessing how your organisation is doing in contributing to community cohesion. This might also provide you with some ideas about how you might embed community cohesion principles into your policies and strategies. 
  • Some examples of good practice.