City and Hackney Population Health Hub (PHH)

About us

The Population Health Hub was established in 2021 to reduce health inequalities and improve the health of our population in City and Hackney. We’re a small team and can’t do this alone – our vision is for everyone across the system to play a role. We work to increase awareness of what’s needed, support others to take action, and advocate for change.

We are a shared, system-wide resource.

We empower teams to take practical steps to reduce health inequalities, while creating the conditions for better health for our residents.
We support a shift from reactivity toward being more preventative and providing fairer, more equitable services.
We drive action to target the root causes of health inequalities.

By strengthening the foundation of the system rather than providing direct interventions, we create enduring impact over the long-term.

We also help others embed resident inclusion, ensuring what is done is relevant and responsive and in support of the City and Hackney Place Based Partnership (PbP) vision:

“Working together with our residents to improve health and care, address health inequalities and make City and Hackney thrive”.

Our key objectives:

What is Population Health?

We work to improve ‘population health’ for people in City and Hackney. Population health is about the wider drivers of health and wellbeing, not just health services. It includes your employment and finances, social networks, housing, safety, and individual behaviours.

Improving population health means enhancing overall wellbeing for everyone and reducing health inequalities. We achieve this by partnering with communities, the NHS, local government, and the voluntary sector (VCS) to tackle the wider determinants of health.

These ‘wider determinants of health’ include:

Economic factors: Employment status and working conditions, pay and poverty.
Social factors: Social networks (friends, family, community life), education, crime and community safety, impacts of racism and prejudice.
Environmental factors: Housing quality, air quality, access to green spaces and nature like parks or gardens, transport.

These factors can create health inequalities (when some groups experience worse health than others through unjust and avoidable differences). For example, a person with poor quality housing and insecure employment can be more susceptible to poor health compared to someone with better quality housing and stable employment.

We need to take action across all of the four areas shown in this image from the King’s Fund.

Taking a population health approach means:

rebalancing investment across the four pillars
focusing attention on the areas of overlap and intersection (the purple ‘rose petals’ in the image) – where there are the greatest opportunities for impact
system partners taking shared responsibility for improving population health

Our vision

When the whole system collaborates (with each other and with communities) with a shared vision working towards shared outcomes, we can genuinely transform the health of our communities.

We want to see a City and Hackney where:

Partners across the system confidently tackle the true drivers of health and wellbeing – from the NHS to the voluntary sector.
Teams feel skilled and empowered to take action.
Residents trust organisations and our public services to act with fairness, integrity, and their best interests at heart.
Health equity has been achieved, resulting in dramatically reduced inequalities and better health for everyone in our community.

What we do and how we help you take action

Meaningful change isn’t always easy or quick. Yet despite the complexity and the pressures we all face, these challenges are within our power to solve, and the Population Health Hub can help you take action.

We do this by providing expertise and support in a range of key areas – including data and insight, community engagement and resident participation, and evaluation and learning. We provide resources, 1:1 support and programmes for people to participate in. We also convene partners across the system to influence policy and practice, and ‘matchmake’ to ensure work is as joined up as possible.

Through our work we aim to leave skills in teams and provide people with the confidence to work differently, so that together we can achieve our aim.

We work to proactively identify what the system needs and we also work in partnership on requests for support from stakeholders across the system. We have six key focus areas where we can provide support to teams:

Not a health expert? We are especially interested in working with teams and services that don’t have an explicit ‘health’ focus in their role. These ‘non-health’ jobs often have the biggest impact on health i.e. housing, welfare, transport, urban planning. We can offer support to help you think more actively about health in your work.

Our impact

We drive change by enabling those on the front lines to solve their own challenges, through data and insight, resources, convening and building cross-sector bridges. Our success is measured by your ability to deliver. We strengthen the foundation of the entire system and prioritise long-term, sustainable impact over quick wins.

Read our latest impact report below.

Examples of our work and impact:

Building capacity (evaluation toolkit, MATCH, health literacy, resident involvement, qualitative research toolkit, literature review toolkit)
Improving infrastructure (inequalities data, outcomes monitoring approach, governance support)
Delivering focused projects (MATCH, youth justice health needs assessment, welfare advice evaluation, peer educators, community-led needs assessment)
Convening and facilitating system-wide collaboration