[vc_row content_placement=”top”][vc_column][vc_column_text]Is it possible for a group of colleagues to get together, develop a vision of what we want our future to look like AND then actually develop strategies to work towards it?

That’s what we had a stab at in November 2016.

The plan was to lock a couple dozen colleagues in a room for the day at the Bournemouth Town Hall with Mike Jackson from Shaping Tomorrow leading the sessions. And that’s just what we did.

Participants were drawn from several organisations both within our health and care system and from outside, table below. I’ve also listed all of the ‘roles’ that colleagues held at that time (roles are not linked to organisations in the table below) to provide an indication of the range of perspectives we had available to us on the day.

Group learning

We first had an overview presentation by Mike Jackson and he provided us with the ‘raw future insights’ produced for this meeting by the Shaping Tomorrow horizon scanning software and talked us through the approach to considering these.

We had about 500 futures insights (Healthy Places Futures Workshop) to work with. The objective was not critical assessment of these insights, because we would have no way of knowing whether these were going to impact Dorset greatly or whether they would even happen. The point was to play a low-tech version of the ‘big data’ game – lots of little insights from many perspectives to which a general direction of travel could be gleaned.

A few examples:

• The UK Government has pledged that autonomous and electric cars will be the focus of new legislation that aims to get people buying driverless cars by 2020.
• Volunteering could help transform health and social care services.
• Population aging will produce large labor-market imbalances and fiscal pressures in high-income countries as the tax base narrows and the cost of caring for the old surges.
• Predictive technology developed by Accenture will help health, social workers and the police spot when problems are arising so they can intervene more quickly.
• All green building councils that operate certification programs will have a net zero tool in place by 2030.

Each group (we broke up into five groups) was tasked with considering futures insights in five of the following 24 topic areas:

1. Transportation
2. Education
3. Technology
4. Travel
5. Urban
6. Work
7. Environment
8. Food
9. Health
10. Homes
11. Aging
12. Alcohol and smoking
13. Collaboration
14. Cycling
15. Public space
16. Retail
17. Streets
18. Traffic
19. Isolation
20. Obesity
21. Pollution
22. Poverty
23. Crime
24. Public safety

What we came up with

We worked in groups to both articulate what we wanted for the future and discuss, in the context of our 500 or so futures insights, how we might get there.

We all want to live in a place with as little pollution as possible, where it is easy to eat healthily, stay fit, socialise, contribute to society and generally enjoy life. We didn’t spend a lot of our time hammering out what this means in practice, because this is rather subjective – rather we focussed on the perceived challenges to achieving this.

Each group worked up some strategies, things that they and their organisations could do to meet the challenges identified by the futures insights. These were then fixed to the walls and each participant was given 10 ‘sticky dots’ that they could use, in any way they wanted, as votes against the various strategies.

I’ve ranked our topic based strategies from the day, below, and you can see how many votes were cast for each of these by the participants. What you can also see in the far-right column is a ‘look back’ exercise conducted by a couple of us recently to see whether Public Health Dorset are working towards any of the identified strategies. I was a little surprised (and raise your hand if you’ve done one of these exercises and then left it in the room afterwards, never to revisit it?) that we were working on most of the identified issues in some shape of form.

I do not claim that we used this workshop output to model our work programme, but it did serve as a talking point for quite some time. Regardless, we are using the learning from this workshop.

I’m not going to go through these proposed strategies in detail, except to say that I didn’t predict the top ranked strategy, before doing the exercise. Shame on me? Clearly, I have pragmatic clear-thinking colleagues all around me. Thank goodness for that!

We need to do a lot of things to ensure a future of healthy places – and the most important strategy is to align population health priorities with political priorities. What I take this to mean is that we, in public health and local government, need to listen more to the concerns of our population if we are to have a hope of engaging them in the co-development of public health strategies. These strategies really do need to be developed together – no one group can bring about a desired “healthy places” future for everyone.

It’s no longer sufficient to only have a great evidence-base and deep public health knowledge, to work together in a meaningful way, we need to understand system issues that might not immediately appear to be public health issues.

And when we understand what those system issues are and how they related to our population, we need to be prepared to spend some time telling that story. Having the ‘answer’ isn’t enough anymore (if it ever way). Go figure.

Where to next?

Get in touch if you’d like more information about how we ran these sessions or what exactly Public Health are doing (right column, above).

We intend to repeat this exercise in November 2018 with an even larger group of colleagues (hopefully we’ll get wider range of colleagues to participate as well) from across the Dorset health and care system with a view to repeating and updating this exercise. We also hope to identify what our partner organisations might have been working on over the last two years that addresses some of the identified challenges. I am looking forward to finding out about that.

This futures blog

This blog is about ‘healthy places’ and what our possible ‘futures’ could be given current trends and momentum within society, the economic and political systems, and the environment. I use the plural ‘futures’ intentionally, because our future is not pre-determined (I hope), we can and should work towards the future we want. This blog aims to generate discussion (maybe even some debate) around ‘Healthy places futures’ in the hope that if we all put our minds to it, a collective vision may emerge, which would inform any strategy we might put in place to get us to our preferred future. We’ll be leaning on heavily on futuring tools found on our Shaping Tomorrow hosted website:  phd.shapingtomorrow.com.