Health Improvement Strategy

Overview

Good health can be like trying to define the proverbial elephant, difficult to describe but easy to spot when we see it. People have told us that being in good health is hugely important to them but we often don’t appreciate this until we become ill.

History has shown us that there are many things that can affect our health:

• Our age, our gender and our family history  
• How we live, what food we eat, whether we smoke, take drugs or drink too much alcohol (our lifestyles)
• Where we live, how warm and safe our homes are
• Whether we have a job, how well we did at school
• Having good friends and family
• What is happening around us, such as the economic climate, how good our water supplies are and whether our community is safe.

Having good health services is important for improving health but in most cases people don’t make contact with health services until they are already ill. To prevent getting ill there are many things we can do for ourselves to improve our own health. We can do some of these things on our own, but for some things we might need other people or organisations to help make a difference.

The latest changes to the NHS are asking councils to work with doctors to enable and support people to take care of their health.  Ahead of these changes we want to get your views and ideas, to understand better what being in good health means to you and how we work with you and the NHS to enable you to improve your health and the health of all our communities.

To enable local people to stay healthier for more of their lives, we would very much like to understand your views. Please take a few minutes to read our strategy and answer the accompanying questions.

Fiona Harris

Joint Consultant in Public Health (Sutton)

London Borough of Sutton