The healthcare crisis urgently needs community development input. Despite a scattering of excellent local initiatives, the major planning on things like how to integrate health and care still doesn’t reflect the fundamental role of communities in keeping people active and connected, and able to influence the services on which they depend. So CD ( in its various forms and under different names) remains on the ‘experimental’ fringe instead of becoming part of a universal approach.
Gabriel Chanan and Dr Brian Fisher have produced the Commissioning Community Development for Health handbook, to give commissioners a practical handle on how they can incorporate CD into their systems, working towards a whole population effect, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. You can find the full pdf here
