About HCT Gloucestershire

The vision behind Healthier Communities Together (HCT) Gloucestershire is that everyone in Gloucestershire has the same opportunities to enjoy wellbeing and health. This is not the case now. Healthy life expectancy at birth varies by over 14 years between the richest and the poorest wards in Gloucestershire. The impact of this manifests itself in many ways.

We know this vision cannot be achieved by a single individual, sector or organisation. It needs many people to pull together, share resources and this takes time and trust.  It also requires a radical new way of working to get to the cause of health problems and not just dealing with the symptoms.  We need to listen, learn and experiment. This requires high levels of trust between all those who need to come together.

 

HCT is a new alliance that has come together to champion this change.  We work in different fields and for various organisations across Gloucestershire and share a passion and commitment to address health inequality.  We have secured start-up funding from the Kings Fund and National Lottery Community Foundation, which we are using to grow a wide and diverse community of people and organisations who share the HCT vision and want to work collaboratively to make it happen.

 

Our intention is building trust for fairer health and our goal is learning: how can that be the reality and truth in our system, and what does it take to get there?

 

 
 

Back in 2022 we designed HCT as a programme structured around these five themes.

Over time we realised this was restricting our thinking and our actions. We were perpetuating linear thinking (input - process - output) and a deterministic mindset (change is attributable to the actions you take: the world is biddable), both of which were so characteristic of a system we felt was not working for people.

We had said we would ‘rip up the rulebook’ and yet here we were, following the rules.

But what else could it look like? How can you change the paradigm that shaped you? Read our Human Learning Systems Case Study to find out about our journey into the unknown.

The Stewardship Group

The Stewardship group came together as a group of people who care about this work and successfully bid for start up funding. Our purpose is to hold space for learning - about new ways to be and work together that build trust.

In doing the work we will be guided by three principles:

  1. Being Human: we seek to trust and be trusted and we bring our whole selves to the work, expecting all of the discomfort, insight, frustration and fulfilment that entails.

  2. Focusing on Learning as the purpose and the goal. Through a learning focus we accept that plans shift, priorities change and newness emerges, and we share what we are learning as a bridge (rather than a lesson) that connects us all and leads us to new insights.

  3. We are interested in the Systems which create social outcomes: we intentionally work on the systemic structures and infrastructure which allows each of us to wholeheartedly practise relational, trusting and complexity-informed thinking in how we do our work together.

 Reference: Human Learning Systems: Public Services for the Real World, available at:  Human Learning Systems.pdf