Overview
The place people live in plays a key role in their health, affecting the choices they make, their relationships and their health behaviours.
It means:
- having a secure, healthy home
- access to nature
- good local employment
- it is easy to eat well, be active and feel connected to friends, family and neighbours.
Oxfordshire’s population is relatively healthy. It does better or similar to the national average on most Public Health indicators. Life expectancy and healthy life expectancy in Oxfordshire are each significantly higher than national and regional averages for both males and females. But Oxfordshire has wide inequalities in health and wellbeing. Males living in the more affluent areas of the county are expected to live around 11 years longer than those in poorer areas. For females the gap in life expectancy is around 12 years. Its population is also ageing, a trend that is forecast to continue, and it is important that people are enabled to live independently in their community.
Through partnership working to deliver the Strategic Vision, the FOP is committed to reducing these health inequalities to create a fairer, healthier and happier population.
What we're doing
The Future Oxfordshire Partnership is committed to supporting healthy place shaping as a strategic priority in enabling communities and the development of new communities which promote health and wellbeing. Healthy place shaping (HPS) is a systems wide approach which aims to create sustainable, well designed, thriving communities where it is easy to be healthy and which provide a sense of belonging, identity and community. It involves action across the following three key workstreams:
- The built environment – Shaping the built environment, green spaces and infrastructure at a local level to improve health and wellbeing.
- Community activation – Working with local people, local community organisations, businesses and schools to engage them in developing places, facilities and services which create health
- New models of care – Re-shaping health, wellbeing and care services, and the infrastructure which supports them, to prevent future poor health and wellbeing.
Healthy place shaping is both an approach and a programme of work. Its principles need to inform policy and strategy but place based activity is also required to deliver tangible change to improve the building blocks of health. In so doing healthy place shaping also supports essential action to address the climate emergency as strengthening the building blocks of health and reducing our carbon footprint are deeply interconnected. Progress in scaling HPS across Oxfordshire is reported here.
