Healthy Faith setting toolkits
Too many people in Birmingham experience poor health too early in their lives, and there is much to be done to improve the situation for individuals, families and communities.
At the forefront of pastoral care and community development, Faith Leaders are well placed to support improvements in health and wellbeing. To enable Faith Leaders in this endeavour, Birmingham City Council is producing a set of Healthy Faith Communities Toolkits for the six dominant faith communities in Birmingham.
The aim is to help Faith Leaders to build health improvement into their day to day work. The toolkits describe opportunities to improve physical and mental health, alongside information on mainstream services and how to access them.
The toolkits are divided into a set of ‘health outcomes’ for community wellbeing highlighting any specific challenges for each community. Topics cover the life course and include issues such as healthy eating, preventing infections and health screening. Each section contains a snapshot of local health and wellbeing needs and local service and support information. At the end is a development opportunity checklist for organisations and groups to identify training and development requirements. This is designed for the faith setting to reflect on their current practices in supporting, signposting and offering interventions which look to address the health needs of the faith users.
These are prototype toolkits and are currently with our design team for a more creative and interactive design. We are also partnering with faith organisations to support with the dissemination of the toolkits, gaining feedback of the suitability of the toolkits as a whole, feedback on the information included in the health-topic sections and collecting case studies of faith-based activities that are currently being carried out within Birmingham. We want to see how the toolkits are in practice so they can be refined and modified to better achieve the goal of improving health and wellbeing.
We hope the toolkits prove to be a useful resource and look forward to their continuing evolution and development.
