Impact Report: How the VCSE Health and Wellbeing Alliance has successfully supported the development of inclusive health and care policy, commissioning, and service design

About the VCSE Health and Wellbeing Alliance

Through their networks, members of the Health and Wellbeing Alliance serve as a key link with thousands of people who face the biggest health inequalities and barriers to health and care services, and as a result, the worst experiences and outcomes.

This has provided policymakers with an invaluable resource, and from 2021 to 2024, the Alliance created opportunities for almost 10,000 people from marginalised and minoritised communities to shape national policy.

National Voices and NAVCA act as joint co-ordinators of the VCSE Health and Wellbeing Alliance, which is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and the UK Health Security Agency.

Evaluating impact

This report brings together data, insights and stories from across the Alliance which exemplify how our ways of working have created change and demonstrate the impact it has had in developing inclusive health and care policy.

It also provides useful context to inform how the partnership model could be improved to help our statutory partners deliver against the ambitions that will be set out in the 10 Year Plan for the NHS.

Over the past three years, the Health and Wellbeing Alliance has completed an incredible 192 projects. Visit the online resource library to see all published work. 

With a commitment from the new government to tackle health inequalities, and halve the gap in healthy life expectancy between communities, they need sustainably resourced initiatives like the Alliance to go even further, developing an evolving understanding of why health inequalities persist, and co-producing how to adjust policy solutions to meet the needs of everyone.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank HW Alliance Members for their extensive insights and contributions, without which this report would not have been possible. We would also like thank the System Partner operational team for helping to shape this report and celebrate the impressive achievements of the HW Alliance as a whole. 

This work has been funded through the VCSE Health and Wellbeing Alliance, jointly managed and funded by the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and the UK Health Security Agency.  

For more information, please visit: https://www.england.nhs.uk/hwalliance/.