To achieve our strategic ambition of improved population health, ELFT is working with the UCL Institute of Health Equity to become the first NHS ‘Marmot Trust’, and test the boundaries of what an NHS Trust can do to tackle some of the drivers of poor health, such as poverty and unemployment.
As a mental health, community service, and primary care provider, we often see service users whose conditions are caused or made worse by poverty, insecure jobs and living conditions. People with severe mental illness (SMI) are dying 15-20 years earlier than they should. NHS Trusts do not usually have the opportunity to have not often tried influence these building blocks of health, as efforts are wholly usually focused on reactively delivering clinical care.
Our Marmot Trust programme of work is exploring how an NHS Trust can work more ‘upstream’ to implement the 'Marmot principles' to reduce health inequalities and ensure the right building blocks are in place to improve health, and stop lives being cut short in the communities we serve. ELFT is the first NHS organisation to explore this, which will be important learning for the NHS.
Marmot principles
The Marmot principles are evidence-based policy objectives to reduce health inequalities, which were originally set out in Professor Sir Michael Marmot’s Review, titled 'Fair Society Healthy Lives’,1 published in 2010. Principles 7 and 8 below have been added more recently:
- Give every child the best start in life
- Enable all children, young people and adults to maximise their capabilities and have control over their lives
- Create fair employment and good work for all
- Ensure a healthy standard of living for all
- Create and develop healthy and sustainable places and communities
- Strengthen the role and impact of ill health prevention
- Tackle racism and its outcomes
- Tackle climate change and health equity in unison