Prevention in Practice: Insights from Action Learning
Please find a PDF version of the report here: Prevention in Practice: Insights from Action Learning
Prevention is often discussed in terms of policy ambition and national plans. Our new report asks a different question: what does prevention look like from the perspective of the people trying to make it happen?
As part of SHERU’s, wider programme exploring how socio-economic policies can contribute to reducing health inequalities, this new report builds on our earlier analysis of Scotland’s housing and employability strategies, examining how these ambitions are experienced in local implementation spaces.
Drawing on six Action Learning Sets involving practitioners, managers and leaders across housing, health, employability, justice, local government and the third sector, the report offers a unique insight into the realities of translating preventative aspirations into practice across policy areas, systems and services.
Rather than evaluating individual organisations or initiatives, this work acts as a metaphorical mirror, highlighting the valuable implementation intelligence held within local systems and the importance of creating space for reflection, learning and adaptation across services to surface critical policy insights that can support implementation.
People are navigating complex systems in Scotland. Our key takeaway is that, if Scotland is serious about taking the kind of preventative approach Christie envisioned, we need to focus much more on understanding the conditions that enable ambitious policies to succeed in practice.
Implementation capacity and contexts need to be recognised and designed into policy from the outset and this requires Scottish Government to move away from top-down policy design towards co-designing policies and implementation plans with the local areas, front line practitioners and the communities who most frequently use key public services.
Please find a PDF version of the report here: Prevention in Practice: Insights from Action Learning
An HTML version will be available soon.