People Powered Health: How services operate

People Powered Health services focus on people, not institutions. Everyone is treated as an individual with access to the right support to live the way they want. Services move away from offering single disease treatment for patients towards engaging with whole human beings with lives that go beyond their medical condition.

The individual is a starting point around which connected, holistic solutions are developed that draw on informal sources of care as well as, or instead of, more formal medicalised services. Formal services are transformed to mobilise the patient as a partner in his or her own health. These services are designed and commissioned with patients and the communities they serve.

In action:

For example, Turning Point's Health and Well-being Centre in Earls Court, one of the People Powered health teams, is offering primary care services, dentistry, long term conditions (LTCs) management support and sexual health services as well as healthy living advice and employment advancement support.

Turning Point is using community researchers to collect information from their communities to design services that are responsive to local needs.

The People Powered Health Newcastle team is moving away from the disease specific views of LTCs; instead, the team has one single care pathway that pulls in resources from all providers of services, both traditional and non-traditional, offering a range of local solutions. Services have clear referral pathways and are tailored to the needs of the individual.

In Lambeth they are focusing on mental health. They are designing services where expert patients are more active and effective in influencing their own recovery and wellbeing. They are offering service users more choices, focused on what they need. Instead of care pathways they will have a 'marketplace' approach to service offers.

Find out more about the other three elements of People Powered Health

• Relationships
• Roles
• Systems

Find out how Nesta and Innovation Unit are delivering People Powered Health