East Herts Community Health and Wellbeing Plan 2023-2028

Thank you for your feedback on the strategy. We are reviewing comments and will upload a new version of the document shortly.

This Community Health and Wellbeing Plan 2023-2028 takes a new direction from the previous East Herts Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2019-2023 with a central focus on the East Herts community.

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, managed communal areas, 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, Herts and Essex Integrated Care Partnership, alongside our County, District and Parish Councils and the voluntary sector.

That said, we recognise the powerful influence of the council and our privileged position as a community leader. We also understand the vital role that supporting organisations play along with the dynamic voluntary sector in contributing to community health and wellbeing. This sector in East Herts is made up of organisations from the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise community and will be described using the letters VCFSE in the document.

  • This plan is written to helps 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. 
  • Where more information is required a link will be provided which can be clicked on. This will lead to a page where there may be extra text, tables or diagrams which give more details to matters mentioned in this plan or research from other organizations.
  • Why do we want to do this? This is to help communities and individuals have a better connection know what their health and wellbeing means to them. This could relate to the place the resident lives in, who they live with or next to and lots of other factors that can help or go against having a good level of health and wellbeing. The aim of this plan is to give residents of East Herts and everyone working together more involvement and decision making about 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 The Health Foundation.

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 regularly with to help improve community health and wellbeing outcomes.

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