Now more than ever:
CHEX National Conference 2024

The 2024 CHEX conference took place at the Studio in Glasgow on Tuesday 5th March with nearly 100 participants working in, and interested in, community-led health.

Expertly-chaired by Tressa Burke, Chief Executive of Glasgow Disability Alliance, the conference was a chance for the community-led health sector to come together to share practice, ideas and learn from each other as we work to ensure community-led health can continue to play its vital role.

We aimed to build on the 2023 CHEX conference, which had focused on health inequalities and the role of community-led health in addressing its causes and effects, and which had informed the latest CHEX policy briefing on Health Inequalities. This year’s conference was a chance to explore some of the issues being faced by our sector, and how we rise to these challenges, in more detail.

Download the event report: Highlighting the role of community-led health

 

Our speakers and workshops

Our keynote speakers were Rachel Baker from Glasgow Caledonian University and Caitlin Frickleton from the Scottish Government.

Rachel spoke about the Common Health Assets project - which is an exciting UK-wide, multi-partner research programme, exploring how community-led organisations impact on health & wellbeing of people in disadvantaged areas. Download her presentation slides (PDF).

Caitlin introduced the work of the Communities Workstream of the Scottish Government’s Place and Wellbeing Programme which is exploring the role of community-led health and wellbeing in tackling health inequalities, including how to build and support the community and voluntary sector to do this. Download her presentation slides (PDF). You can also visit our Places and Wellbeing page to keep up to date with this programme of work and find out about our involvement in it.

The workshops at the conference were on a wide variety of topics within the sector and you can access the presentation slides below. There is also more detail on each workshop in the event report.

Key messages from our delegates at the workshops:

  • The need to better understand the role of community-led health and how it works. Without this, there is a danger that it is seen as merely a way to address gaps in public services or to mitigate the worst effects of inequalities.

  • Understanding should be accompanied by trust and sustained funding, recognising the ongoing role that community-led organisations play in preventative health and wellbeing.

  • Equally, policy makers and funders should appreciate that many community organisations are stretched to breaking point and unable to carry out proper development work due to crisis management.

  • There was an emphasis on the role of partnership and joint funding bids, which both funders and community-led organisations can learn from.

Download the workshop slides as PDF documents:

Workshop A: Creating Hope Together with Communities
Workshop B: 24 years and counting: Yipworld’s support for young people and families in East Ayrshire
Workshop C: Community Led Health in Collaboration – Together we can make a difference
Workshop D: “Vicarious Trauma? Burnout? Nah, it’s just every day in here…”
Workshop E: Workshop : Youth participation and the power to make change! How Health Issues in the Community (HIIC) makes a difference.