Working with communities to improve health: The Building Community Capacity programme

This paper examines the aspiration set out in the Health Visitor Implementation Plan (Department of Health, 2011) to work with communities to build up their capacity and use that capacity to improve health outcomes. It looks at why building capacity matters for families as well as communities. The nationally commissioned Building Community Capacity programme is centred on a web-supported work-based project, aiming to refresh health visitors’ skills and allow them make a real difference to communities. Participants had to seek out agencies and individuals with whom to collaborate, work out how to match strategic objectives and maximise resources, and ensure that suitable outcome measures could be identified. Successful projects identified key factors such as organisational leadership, clear commitment and investment. Some of the issues faced included the relatively restricted timescale placed on the projects and organisational demands, which meant some projects were building staff or organisational capacit...