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WHAM
Poverty and social deprivation damage health throughout life. Without action, health inequalities will widen. Clinicians are in a unique position to help.
Join the movement
Poverty and social deprivation damage health throughout life. Without action, health inequalities will widen. Clinicians are in a unique position to help.
If lifestyles and living conditions contribute 80% to population health outcomes and healthcare received only 20%, what on earth are we doing?
As a child health professional, the job description on the tin is: ‘treating sick kids’. But it doesn’t matter how many children we treat, we’ll never get to the bottom of today’s health challenges until we tackle the root of the problem.
The problem is that clinicians rarely talk about the social determinants of health or health inequalities with their patients. This results in missed opportunities to ‘make every contact count’ and help in meaningful and materially significant ways.
Modern health systems and medical training not only consistently fail to idenitify the real ‘causes of the causes’ of illness, but also systematically fail to equip clinicians to do anything about them. As a result clinicians feel hopeless, helpless and burned out.
We believe health is co-created. We can all be agents of change: ordinary clinicians and service users alike can work together to change clinical practice, healthcare systems and the world itself.
The engine for change in healthcare is quality improvement (QI). QI is often bandied around in NHS as though it were somehow special; an add on, that requires specialist training for a specific kind of person in a specific kind of role.
We don’t buy that.
Creativity
Curiosity and a
Commitment to making things better.
But no one makes change alone. We need the knowledge, tools and community to take action
WHAM is a ‘social incubator’ , or community of practice, that combines the principles of improvement science, coaching, and the power of digital to empower clinicians and the families they serve to put health equity and behavioral change at the heart of medical consultations.
We need a new way to practice medicine. One that creates health, not just fixes disease; one that sees the whole patient, not just individual organs; and one which understands that.
Health needs social justice.
Health is created by the social, economic, and environmental conditions in which we live, but most investment occurs downstream, namely in acute clinical services. WHAM’s goal is to help shift the attention of health systems and health policy towards an upstream, holistic, and equitable vision of health and wellbeing by changing health professional cultures, capabilities, and ultimately, care delivered.
It is time for clinicians to step up in the fight against health inequality.
If you believe in what we're doing and want to be part of a movement for better, fairer healthcare
