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Place Based Assets

Asset-based approaches are a way of looking at what a community/ population have, rather than what they lack. This approach helps to value and utilise existing skills, knowledge, and relationships in a community. Taking an Asset-based approach to planning, will ensure local communities, community and voluntary sector organisations and statutory services work together to plan, design, develop, deliver, and evaluate health and wellbeing initiatives.

NICE guidance Community engagement: improving health and wellbeing and reducing health inequalities describes:

  • Using evidence-based approaches to community engagement (see collaborations and partnerships and peer and lay roles).
  • Being clear about which decisions people in local communities can influence and how this will happen.
  • Recognising, valuing, and sharing the knowledge, skills, and experiences of all partners, particularly those from the local community (see the section on learning and training).
  • Making each partner's goals for community engagement clear.
  • Respecting the rights of local communities to get involved as much or as little as they are able or wish to.
  • Establishing and promoting social networks and the exchange of information and ideas (on issues such as different cultural priorities and values).

Public Health Wales have developed resources to support individual and community empowerment which support the Primary Care Model for Wales (PCMW) outcomes one and two.  Actions that initiate greater individual and collective control is health promoting in its own right. Empowerment also improves social relationships at the individual and population level, and when empowered individuals are engaged in service improvement work, service development and delivery is better and more likely to meet the needs of service users. 

Empowerment is not something professionals or organisations ‘do to’ a community, however it is our role to create the conditions whereby communities can take power. The Principles of Community Engagement for Empowerment aim to encourage reflective practice when working with and for communities.

Social prescribing is an umbrella term that describes a person-centred approach to connecting people to local community assets. Community assets include community groups, interventions and services which could be delivered online or in person, as well as buildings, land or even a person within a community. It can help empower individuals to recognise their own needs, strengths, and personal assets and to connect with their own communities for support with their health and wellbeing.

Information to support clusters in identifying their health and care, and community assets within the cluster footprint include: