Camden ANCHOR

The Camden ANCHOR is a registered charity which aims to promote and protect the health of the public, and in particular among people residing in London, by providing an infrastructure that involves people in a collective effort to build confidence in their own abilities and to experience opportunities that build their capacity and capabilities for positive health and well-being outcomes.

The Camden ANCHOR is an organisation which aims to educate the public and service providers on health and how best to promote health in the community. Also, uniting the service providers in suitable health projects for the community, and researching into the health needs of the community.

A unique element of our approach is to blend healthcare, social care and user-led support seeking to champion people’s health, wellbeing, independence and control through a deep understanding of:

Population (age, deprivation, current health needs, ethnicity, social isolation)
Place (local provision of health and care services, communities, voluntary sector provision, housing, education and schools)
Things that matter to people (engagement, co-production, measurement) and a new structure to support delivery

International evidence demonstrates that in order to promote, protect and improve health outcomes there are three key strands:

Camden ANCHOR was created to ‘bridge the gap’ ensuring a link across health-general practice, primary care network (PCN) and community health support- to those focused on increasing health awareness, encouraging self-management and providing more care in the community thereby straddling all three key strands in improving outcomes.

Our knowledge of the population (both data-driven and anecdotal from our practices/Primary Care Networks and partners) enables us to identify those groups who are currently experiencing the worst health and well-being outcomes, or who are at increased risk of experiencing them. Once identified, the model ensures that those individuals together with their families, communities (and community leaders) are enabled to define the outcomes that are important to them and what is needed to help them to achieve and maintain positive health and well-being outcomes and to co-design and co-produce the services that will support them.

Critical to success will be the ability to prioritise and define those groups of the population with the worst outcomes and to understand in detail the contributory factors to this. Working with our academic partners this will be done through consideration of, for example:

The impact of different disease or combinations of disease on outcomes
The impact of demographics on needs-age, ethnicity
The impact of wider determinants of health-housing, employment, education
How groups define themselves and for each group which of the three key strands does not work for them and why-e.g. prevention/promotion of health and screening? Access to services? Lacking understanding/capacity/confidence to manage their own health?

The use of both evidence-based practice (data-driven) and practice-based evidence (the knowledge and lived-experience of people and professionals) will be key to design, implementation and measurement of all initiatives and a key driver of confidence in the new infrastructure underpinning the building of people’s capacity and capabilities for positive health and well-being outcomes

Service examples

The following examples are based on the above methodology/template linking back to:

Three Key strands and a focus on the importance of each strand
Identified populations
User-defined outcomes/needs
Co-designed/co-produced models
Evaluation and measurement of outcomes/outputs

Take a look at the services:

D Magic

The Listening Space

Covid 19