With the Town Investment Plan submitted to government and our nine shortlisted projects revealed to the public, the Town Deal wanted to share information with you about what it means to be a ‘Health Town’.
This is a core value for the Camborne Town Deal Board. Ensuring the physical and mental health and well-being of Camborne residents is central to many of the projects we have chosen to include in our plans for the future of Camborne.
What is a Health Town?
(Source: NHS England)
The Government, working in partnership with the NHS, has been looking at how development in towns can create healthier and more connected communities which enhance the wellbeing of the people who live there. This is called their Healthy New Towns initiative.
People’s opportunities for health are influenced by factors outside of the health and social care system. They lie in the circumstances in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age: the social determinants of health. These are the ‘causes of the causes’ of ill health and they can enable individuals and societies to flourish, or not.
Creating a healthier population requires greater action on these issues. This includes addressing the role of both the physical built environment and the social factors which shape neighbourhoods and places.
With this in mind NHS England launched the Healthy New Towns programme in 2015 to explore how the development of new places could provide an opportunity to create healthier and connected communities with integrated and high-quality health services. The programme worked with 10 ‘demonstrator sites’ chosen in March 2016 from over 100 applicants to help do this. These developments ranged from 900 to 15,000 homes at different stages of the process, with diverse health needs, levels of income and inequalities.
The places where people live have a significant impact on their mental and physical health, but that impact is too often negative and linked to a range of complex but preventable determinants of health such as income and education. In the most deprived areas life expectancy for women and men is 19 years behind the most affluent areas.
The ten core principles for helping to create a healthy town include:
- Plan ahead collectively
- Assess local health and care needs
- Involve and empower people and communities
- Create compact neighbourhoods
- Maximise active travel
- Inspire and enable healthy eating
- Fosteer health in homes and buildings
- Enable healthy play and leisure
- Develop health services that help people stay well
- Create integrated health and wellbeing centres
How will the projects for Camborne Town Deal support this?
Camborne Town Deal have developed projects that connect to the theme of ‘Healthy by Design’, offering economic, social and environmental benefits.
We want to support projects that:
- Offer young people quality work and training opportunities in their home town
- Ensure our young people are support to have good mental health and social skills
- Develop a town that isn’t centred around the car
- Ensure working age people earning their potential, and contributing to the economy
- Provide working age people with a vibrant 15 minute neighbourhood
- Develop buildings which complement the place and the planet
- Allow our older people to share in prosperity
- Involve older people in community activities
- Have green spaces integrated into work and leisure
- Increase young people earning the Real Living Wage or higher
- Provide top-class community facilities for young people
- Improve our air quality
- Help to increase in working age people choosing to site their business or career in Camborne
- Help to increase adult participation in cultural activities
- See older people engaging in social prescribing rather than primary care
- Increase adult participation in exercise
- Ensure our residents are never being more than five minutes from greenery
What projects have we chosen?
You can find out more about our nine shortlisted projects here. As part of our shortlisting process, we considered how the projects would deliver on our goals of making Camborne a healthier place.
