Thriving Together 2023 - 2027

With a central focus on the East Herts Community, Thriving Together: Promoting healthy lifestyles, community wellbeing and sustainability 2023 - 2027 takes a new direction from the previous East Herts and Wellbeing Strategy 2019 – 2023.

The vision is for councillors, officers, organisations, partners, and residents together making East Herts an even healthier place in which to live, work and grow. It will also enable the health and wellbeing needs of residents to be listened to and acted upon, especially if they feel they have not been heard before. East Herts is a vibrant place in which to live with so many great opportunities and community features. We score well when compared to nearby areas in health and wellbeing terms, yet we also have many health challenges that can impact daily living and in accessing those opportunities. The Plan and supporting Action Plan will help ensure East Herts is and remains a great place in which to live for all ages and backgrounds.

Only by working together, as a community, can we address the health challenges and opportunities we have to ensure that residents are fully supported in living the highest possible quality of life. East Herts benefits from a wide range of committed organisations, community and business venues, parks and open spaces and managed communal areas. It also offers a wide range of arts and cultural activities that are dedicated to improving the health and wellbeing of East Herts residents.

It would be unwise, to think East Herts Council can tackle health and wellbeing alone. Involvement and delivery can be through national and regional health agencies, the Herts and Essex Integrated Care Partnership (ICP), the Integrated Care System (ICS) and the Integrated care Board (ICB), as well as alongside our County, District and Parish Councils and the voluntary sector. In East Herts this is made up of organisations from the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise community sectors and will be described using the letters VCFSE. Hertfordshire County Council (HCC) Public Health also has a key role to play in supporting good health and wellbeing and is tasked with the overall responsibility for achieving this across Hertfordshire.

The previous strategy used the Professor Marmot life course priorities and these are still very much part of the council’s community health and wellbeing thinking. These connect very closely with the ICS overall priorities and will be used to connect the local East Herts focus and the wider Hertfordshire and west Essex together. These are to:

  1. Give every child the best start in life
  2. Support our communities and places to be healthy and sustainable
  3. Support our residents to maintain healthy lifestyles
  4. Enable our residents to age well and support people living with dementia
  5. Improve support for people living with life-long conditions, long-term health conditions, physical disabilities, and their families
  6. Improve our residents’ mental health and outcomes for those with learning disabilities and autism

This plan will help community health and wellbeing in East Herts to flourish by:

  1. Supporting individuals to improve their health and wellbeing
  2. Enabling groups in the community to support themselves and each other
  3. Using partnership co-operation and clear actions to improve community health and wellbeing

Please view the draft East Herts Community Health and Wellbeing Plan 2023-2028.

It contains an Executive summary at the beginning, then moves into the main sections of the Plan. It also includes links to health data and other information.

  • This plan is written to help residents, councillors, officers, organisations and those we partner with to understand what community health and wellbeing is about. Where possible, simple explanations will be used to convey health and wellbeing meaning using text, diagrams or pictures. 

Why do we want to do this? 

This is to help communities and individuals have a better connection with what their health and wellbeing means to them. The place the resident lives in, or the neighbourhood they grow up in, along with access to local facilities and services can all add to or lessen the level of health and wellbeing enjoyed by a community. The aim of this plan is to give residents of East Herts and everyone working together more involvement in helping East Herts to be a healthier district to live in.

If you would like to know why the health challenges have been used in the Plan and would find it useful to learn more about the community health and wellbeing measures for East Herts, then please visit use the resources and reports below. Another useful source of information is The Health Foundation approach to using simpler language and the concept of building blocks to help understand how health and wellbeing affects us and our community. 

The health actions linked to the Community priorities in sections 3.1 to 3.3 are also based on some of this information and other feedback we receive from our councillors, residents, health and wellbeing partners and organisations we work with. Learning and insight helps with knowing how best to help improve community health and wellbeing outcomes in East Herts.

  1. East Herts District report
  2. The Health Foundation - How to talk about the building blocks of health. 
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