Feature

A forum for collective action on health

Allison Watt explains the Bradford experience of forming a community health forum

Perhaps unusually, Bradford Community Health Forum was investigated from within Bradford University, where I had taken up post on the then Health Education Council’s academic programme. Part of my brief was to support and develop community health action locally.

To do this my first task was to contact local community health activists — people who ere working to raise awareness of the roots of ill health, and to enable people to gain control over their lives in such a ways to counter ill health and promote better health — and ask them to come to a meeting.

The most dominant aspect of that meeting, and the least expected on my part, was the excitement amongst the participants at the opportunity to meet each other. While there was familiarity within groupings — such as all community workers knowing each other — not one person in the room knew everyone. We therefore spent a long time on introductions and information exchanges.

In that meeting alone the community health council secretary made arrangements with a social worker to come to a particular meeting, a community health worker was asked by health education workers to contribute to some training, and a worker from a well women’s centre enlisted support in recruiting volunteers.

From this first meeting it was clear to everyone that the need for a forum for information and resource exchange had been amply demonstrated. So we planned to establish a Community Health Forum and to produce a newsletter as a means of making the existence and activities of the forum as widely known as possible. Deciding upon distribution of the newsletter provoked an interesting discussion about the nature of community health action, and the overall aims and objectives of the emerging forum. It was felt that the innovative and progressive elements of community health action should not be lost at the expense of trying to reach everybody, and that the Forum would favour, broadly, activities that were based within the principle of addressing health inequalities.

It was agreed that the initial aim of the forum would be to facilitate exchange and co-operation between community health activists. This would later be expanded, once the forum was established, to the promotion of community health action via liaison within health professionals, social workers, the local authority and the wider voluntary sector.

In order to consolidate the forum and create a visible entity, we felt it vital that we should engage in a major project. A timely suggestion by the Community Health Initiatives Resource Unit (now National Community Health Resource) that a first ever national conference on community heath action be held at Bradford University was well received.

The conference was a great success. What it particularly served to do for Bradford’s Community Health Forum was to underline the appropriateness of its existence and to help all the forum members think about future directions. With the regional health authority we jointly planned and organised another conference focusing on community health education for health education officers employed by the NHS. Later we compiled a directory of community health initiatives in Bradford, which was widely distributed, held a series of training seminars for community development workers and held a number of public meetings about topical health issues.

But all has not been uncomplicated in he life of he forum. A continual problem has been finding the time to meet the benefit from the potential that such a group offers, or to engage in local health campaigns — or instigate new ones. This frustration prompted us to seek funding for a full time community health resource. In summary, the forum has provided — and continues to do so — a much needed space for otherwise isolated health activists to meet, exchange ideas, co-ordinate work, moan and encourage one another.

As the individualism in Thatcherite policies continues to pervade, it becomes increasingly important to resist through collective action. Establishing a community health forum is one relatively simple and effective means available to community health activities.