UPCOMING EVENTS
Social Prescribing Day 19 March 25
Social Prescribing Day - 19th March
Social Prescribing Day is an annual celebration of the people, organisations and communities who make social prescribing happen. Since 2019, thousands of local, national and international organisations, link workers, medical professionals, academics and students have taken part across the world.
SCHW Consortium for Health
Our consortium approach ensures that our partner organisations are empowered to be involved in larger national major funding opportunities. It is a way of moving beyond local funding opportunities and to do specific pieces of work that may not be funded at a local level. The consortium approach offers organisations the opportunity to:
Secure contracts or funding that would not otherwise be available.
Extend their service provision into new fields.
Gain new expertise or to extend their activities in to new geographies or other community groups.
‘The Even Bigger Big Get Together’ Connecting, challenging, making things happen - Thursday 3rd April 2025
Our Even Bigger Get Together will:
Exchange our experiences of community-led health in action
Explore new evidence of how we can make a difference
Discuss and connect what we can do ourselves to create momentum and increase our impact
Challenge government, the NHS ourselves and others to move beyond rhetoric to collectively invest in and embed community-led action.
This free event will share insights from partners in our network, Glasgow Caledonian University, and the Scottish Governments Place and Wellbeing programme.
We will also explore national initiatives which we can relate to including the collaborative National Suicide Prevention Strategy, the Institute of Health Equality “Marmot Places”, the Scottish Government National Public Health Framework and share great practice from our SCHW organisations.
We will have workshops which will provide platforms for active discussions on all of the above and the structures for securing community led health and wellbeing investment and improvement across Scotland.
Find out more and signup here - SCHW: ‘The Even Bigger Big Get Together’ | SCDC - We believe communities matter
CHEX Conference - Knowledge Into Action
Knowledge into action: CHEX Conference 2025
The Barracks Conference Centre, Stirling
This year our focus is on turning knowledge and learning into action on the most pressing issues facing our sector.
We’ll be using a bit of a different format from usual, so instead of focusing on speakers, we’ll be hosting keynote listeners. These listeners will be there to hear your experiences and insights and work with us to ensure that our collective knowledge and experience is better understood and fed into work at the national level.
The conference will create a space for constructive cross-sectoral dialogue, which enables strategic decision-makers to better understand the day-to-day reality of what it takes to undertake community-led health practice across Scotland.
There will also be lots of time for networking and discussion and a chance to celebrate all your hard work over the year - we’re still working on the details of the programme so more information to come soon.
Please fill in the booking form to secure your place and we’ll look forward to seeing you there!
Our Listeners
Professor Linda Bauld
Professor Linda Bauld OBE is the Bruce and John Usher Chair in Public Health in the Usher Institute, College of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and Chief Social Policy Adviser to the Scottish Government.
Her research focuses on the prevention or treatment of the main modifiable risk factors for Non-Communicable Diseases including cancer, diabetes and respiratory and cardiovascular diseases with a particular focus on tobacco, alcohol, diet and inequalities in health.
Professor Bauld is Director of the SPECTRUM Consortium funded by the UK Prevention Research Partnership and Co-Director of Behavioural Research UK, funded by the ESRC. She is a former Scientific Adviser to the UK Department of Health and the World Health Organisation on tobacco control. Between 2014 and 2021 she combined her academic roles with serving as Cancer Research UK’s cancer prevention adviser.
She is a Trustee of Diabetes UK and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, the Faculty of Public Health, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Social Sciences.
Ruth Glassborow
Ruth brings extensive knowledge and experience of effecting change through both influencing national policy and translating policy priorities into national change programmes that deliver meaningful sustained improvement across public services.
As Director of Population Health and Wellbeing at Public Health Scotland, Ruth provides strategic leadership for the translation of public health data, evidence, intelligence and knowledge into effective improvements in policy and practice with a focus on getting upstream and addressing the wider determinants of health and wellbeing.
In her previous role as Director of Improvement at Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Ruth provided strategic leadership for the development and delivery of a range national programmes and approaches that enabled the application of quality improvement and large scale system redesign methodology to key health and social care system change priorities.
Ruth has a Masters in Public Administration from Warwick Business School and a Masters in Leadership (Quality Improvement) from Ashridge Business School. She is also a Health Foundation Generation Q fellow, a Health Foundation Sciana fellow and a qualified executive coach.
Rachel Baker
Rachel is Director of the Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health and Professor of Health Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University.
She leads the Common Health Assets project, in which CHEX is a partner. Common Health Assets is a UK-wide, multi-partner, multi-component research programme, exploring how community-led organisations impact on health & wellbeing of people in disadvantaged areas. It is in the final stages after 3 years of research and analysis is ongoing.
Common Health Assets is funded by the National institute for Health Research (NIHR), led by the Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health at Glasgow Caledonian University and brings together community and academic partners from across the UK.
We are now at capacity - please sign up for the waiting list and we’ll be in touch!
SPRING Evaluation Report
The SPRING Social Prescribing project operated from July 2018 to June 2023. It connected people aged 18+ to support within their community to improve their health and wellbeing. Social Prescribers were based in 19 delivery partners, community-led health organisations throughout Scotland and Northern Ireland. SPRING was a partnership between SCHW and the Healthy Living Centre Alliance in Northern Ireland, funded by the UK National Lottery Community Fund. The lead organisation was Bogside and Brandywell Health Forum.
The second and final evaluation report on the project by evaluators Cavanagh Kelly mainly covers the period November 2020 to December 2022. Click here to download the full report
Research by Johan Mackenbach, Professor of Public Health at the University Medical Centre Rotterdam
Research by Johan Mackenbach, Professor of Public Health at the University Medical Centre Rotterdam
A new study on health inequalities across 10 European countries including Scotland makes fascinating listening! It is not yet published but watch out for it. If you have an interest in understanding the nature and causes of health inequalities tune in to this research or go on line for other related publications by the same author especially Health Inequalities: Europe in Profile which highlights:
Inequalities in health between people with higher and lower educational level, occupational class and income level have been found in all European countries.
The widening of some of these health inequalities during the last decades of the 20th century has increased the urgency of this public health problem.
This independent report, commissioned by the UK Presidency of the European Union, gives a comprehensive overview of patterns and trends.
Scotland Blue Print for Health
Scottish Communities for Health and Wellbeing (SCHW) has been working for three years on producing a Blueprint for a healthier Scotland to present to the Scottish Government. Many community led organisations have contributed to shaping the Blueprint and many critical friends have commented on drafts. Thank you for your great help. We now have the final version of the Blueprint. To view the Blue print please click here