It was a pleasure to speak at #ISPC2024 yesterday. The main points I shared were: 1. From Needy to Needed: Emphasize the importance of community-led health and well-being by shifting the focus from viewing people who are supported as "needy" to recognizing them as needed. People are essential change agents for community and population health, not passive consumers. Ensuring that individuals feel valued and have meaningful social roles in promoting community health and well-being is crucial to their own well-being as well as their wider communities. People who are active contributors to creating a healthy community are acting in solidarity, not charity. Health beyond healthcare cannot be done to us or for us; we must do the work to place community at the center of healthier futures. Institutions remain necessary but insufficient to properly understand health as a social and political condition, not just a medical one. This is a direct challenge to the current dominant public narratives about health. 2. From Wrong to Strong: Prioritize building on strengths rather than focusing on deficits and labels, but avoid taking strengths for granted. Community development, social justice-based approaches, and an equity lens should be foundational and inform policies and practices throughout, instead of individualized therapy or lifestyle interventions as is currently the case. 3. From Supplanting to Supplementing: It is crucial, therefore, to shift policy and practice from Institutions that supplant community health creation to institutions that supplement it, moving from disabling to enabling states at all levels of government. This redesign is much bigger than Social Prescribing, and those who think Social Prescribing is the panacea are not paying attention. This level of co-becoming involves integrated care, neighborhood pooled budgets, community development, universal basic income, stronger trade union involvement, and a resurgence of the cooperative movements. To achieve all this, we must first relocate authority and equity to citizens proportionate to those who are experiencing structural inequality, racism, and economic poverty. As Isaac Prilleltensky has pointed out, "there can be no wellness without fairness." 4. From Charity/therapy to Solidarity: The bigger picture here calls us to set our sights beyond short-term relief action towards changing the social order that has led us up to this point. We require enabling states that support neighborhood belonging, community cohesion, and community control. That is how we’ll democratically respond to poly-crises and ensure proportionate universalism, as described by @MichaelMarmot Achieving this vision of health beyond healthcare and hospitals towards health and community is about ensuring that those currently defined as having a problem secure the power to redefine the problem from sickness and fragmentation to wellness and integration.

Thank you for your kind words. 🙏 #ISP2024