Supporting local collaboration to drive practical, locally relevant change

Regional collaboration

Healthy Futures East (HFE) is a new regional collaboration bringing together universities, NHS bodies, local authorities and community organisations to improve population health. HFE is building on the work of the East of England Population Health Research Hub (PHResH), which demonstrated the value of regional collaboration, capacity building and systems thinking. Connecting research and practice, building capacity, knowledge exchange, and driving impactful, sustainable improvements in health and care services with a clear focus on achieving population health impact is at the heart of these programmes.

Health Innovation East has worked with HFE since its inception by contributing to PHResH Advisory, Steering and Working Groups. Building on this partnership, the collaboration is being further strengthened through the appointment of Dr Judith Fynn, Research Design and Insights Lead at Health Innovation East, who will lead the Healthy Futures East Prevention Workstream for the next 12 months (April 2025 – March 2026).

A focus on prevention

The Prevention workstream will work with stakeholders across the East of England to address current population health challenges and identify realistic solutions. The workstream is supporting locally driven projects by applying systems approaches, setting up project task forces to ensure practice-based and academic experience and expertise are brought together, and supporting two Fellows to conduct research projects that tackle local issues identified through their public health roles.

The shift from treatment to prevention is central to the 10 Year Health Plan; and was identified as a priority area to focus on by regional stakeholders that have formed the Advisory Group for Healthy Futures East. The workstream, focused on three core themes of building inclusive prevention, developing prevention-ready places, and making prevention work, aims to deliver impactful projects to drive improvements for the delivery of prevention interventions and population health across the region.

Prevention workstream projects

The workstream is currently delivering four projects across these three themes.

1. Exploring inclusive and equitable decision-making within a cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention pathway: Adopting a systems lens to map decision-making processes within CVD prevention pathways and exploring opportunities for including patient and public voices.
2. Health Check delivery models, reach and impacts: Working with the Regional Public Health team to explore different delivery models for health checks, and how these may influence reach, access, uptake, and health inequalities.
3. Developing a co produced, place based service map to navigate children and young people’s mental health support: Helping professionals, families, and communities to navigate support, while strengthening shared understanding and accountability across the system. (HFE Visiting Fellow Project)
4. Exploring how Warm Homes and wider prevention initiatives can be embedded into commissioning, metrics, and cross sector delivery: Aligning environmental, health, and social care priorities to reduce demand and improve outcomes at scale. (HFE Visiting Fellow Project)