What is Rethinking Our Health?

Rethinking Our Health is an innovative, community-led approach to co-designing support with people who live every day with the reality of long-term conditions. 

Created in partnership with The King’s Fund, it brings together communities, local government, health, care and voluntary sector partners- not to tweak what exists, but to radically rethink and redesign what health and care should be. 

Read the latest updates from Rethinking Our Health

Rethinking Our Health in a nutshell

Insights that shape our approach

We know people face a wide range of barriers to managing their health—from housing and transport to juggling multiple conditions, isolated services, and limited support. 

Co-design helps change that. It reveals opportunities to bridge gaps between NHS, local government, the VCSE sector, and communities. When people with lived experience help shape solutions from the start, they’re more relevant, more responsive – and more likely to work.  

What makes the Rethinking Our Health approach different?

• Community led: Build from strengths, not just needs. 
• Co-delivered, clinically backed: Health professionals and communities working together. 
• Personalised care: Support tailored to each person’s life goals, not just their medical condition. 
• Social & clinical factors treated equally: Housing, transport, isolation, caring responsibilities considered alongside symptoms. 
• Reduce Health Inequality: Actively addressing health inequity – head on. 
• Trauma-informed practice: Respecting people’s experiences and avoiding re-traumatising 
• Open sharing of what we learn 

We’re moving beyond reactive, condition-by-condition care towards whole-person approaches that support self-management, peer networks, prevention, and community-powered change.

Rethinking Our Health is a way to:

• Build on the success of our Community Appointment Day model and apply it to new conditions and communities
• Give equal weight to social needs and clinical care 
• Test new ways of working, from workforce models to venues, across multiple long-term conditions 
• Develop a community-led, evidence-informed model for long-term condition support 
• Show how co-design can improve relevance, uptake and equity 
• Strengthen how we address the social determinants of health in primary and community care 
• Learn, test and assure quality, before scaling further 

What we’re aiming to do

Rethinking Our Health is about working with communities to design and test new ways of offering support that will:  

• be rooted in the community and built around people’s real lives  
• be clinically backed and co-designed with local professionals  
• recognise and respond to the social and environmental barriers people face  
• help prevent the development of additional conditions  

Initially, we will focus on supporting people living with osteoarthritis, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, which are often experienced together. We expect pain and mental health to be important factors in this work, although persistent pain will not be included in the project.  

Our principles

• Community led: Build from strengths, not just needs. 
• Co-delivered, clinically backed: Health professionals and communities working together. 
• Personalised care: Support tailored to each person’s life goals, not just their medical condition. 
• Social & clinical factors treated equally: Housing, transport, isolation, caring responsibilities considered alongside symptoms. 
• Reduce Health Inequality: Actively addressing health inequity – head on. 
• Trauma-informed practice: Respecting people’s experiences and avoiding re-traumatising 
• Open sharing of what we learn 

Join the journey

We’ll be sharing our learning as we go – publishing regular reflections and learnings on what works (and what doesn’t).