What is community-led health?

Community-led health is a way for people in a community to take joint action to improve things for their community, leading to improved health and wellbeing.

Everyone has a right to good health, but in Scotland good health is not equally distributed.

Some people have long healthy lives while others suffer ill health and die younger. These health inequalities are unjust, avoidable and are caused by differences in income, power and influence. Find out more about health inequalities.

Community-led health helps to tackle these inequalities by bringing people together to take action on what’s important to them.

This can lead to improved health and wellbeing not only for those involved but also for the wider community. Their collective actions can provide a greater ability to have a say in decisions that affect them; thus redressing existing imbalances in power and influence.

What do community-led health organisations look like?

The special characteristics common to CLH organisations:  

  • Operating in areas of poverty and deprivation.

  • Providing services aimed at tackling health inequalities. 

  • Working on priorities identified by members of the community. 

  • Using methods which involve community members. 

  • Applying a value base that promotes personal and collective empowerment, equity, social justice and the right to good health for all people.

  • Working within a social model of health.

  • With governance that involves community members (this may be in partnership with the voluntary, statutory or business sector if appropriate).

  • Sharing resources.

  • Providing a collective voice.

You can see more than 150 community-led health organisations in our Network

Our approach 

A community-led approach to health improvement is now a significant feature of health improvement policy and practice. It gives particular emphasis to understanding the central role of development support to empower communities as architects of actions that impact on their own health.  The Scottish Government Health Directorate has endorsed the approach since Dec. 2006, when it launched recommendations and subsequent plans to build capacity through the Healthy Communities: Meeting the Shared Challenge capacity building programme.   

The Community-led Health Logic Model illustrates this approach.