A place-based approach to healthy, happy lives

This chapter outlines innovative approaches to maintain a healthy, happy, and safe community. The wider determinants of health — housing, environment, leisure, income, and education — are well recognised and are just as important as access to good health care. If we want to develop long-term strategies to enable social and cultural change with new models of care, more community-based responsibility for our neighbours and more freedoms and flexibilities to help us make better choices, then the role of place is key. place-based approaches, involving health and social care integration and outcome commissioning, have been developed with a view to a consideration of 'health' in all council planning. This reflects the place-based approach that is being promoted by the London Borough of Sutton as it delegates its statutory duties across the range of services it manages, collaborating with other statutory and third sector organisations within and beyond the two parliamentary constituencies of Sutton and Cheam, and Carshalton and Wallington. A place-based approach to health and wellbeing, in its widest sense, can bring together all parts of the public sector to focus on positive outcomes.