Healthy place shaping
Introduction
The place people live in plays a key role in their health, affecting the choices they make, their relationships and their health behaviours.
It means:
- having a secure, healthy home
- access to nature
- good local employment
- it is easy to eat well, be active and feel connected to friends, family and neighbours
Oxfordshire County Council’s Public Health team provides three-year grant funding to Oxfordshire’s city and district councils to support the delivery of Healthy Place Shaping projects that improve health and wellbeing in local communities. The funding enables a wide range of initiatives that make it easier for people to be active, connect with nature and build stronger social connections. Recent projects have included community e-bike schemes, walking and wayfinding routes, Park Yoga sessions, nature-based activities for children and families, outdoor learning spaces, community growing initiatives and programmes that help reduce loneliness and strengthen community resilience. Together, these projects help create healthier, more inclusive and sustainable places where everyone can thrive.
The Public Health team previously funded an E-bike Loan Scheme in Oxford between April 2023 and August 2024. The Oxford E-Bike Loan Scheme final report (pdf format, 1 MB), compiled by Active Oxfordshire, shows the project's results.
Oxfordshire County Council commissioned Active Oxfordshire to deliver the Community Outreach Active Travel (COAT) programme, with funding secured across three consecutive years. These reports highlight the results of the programme’swalking and cycling initiatives, together with case studies which show some of the fantastic achievements this grant funding has had on getting Oxfordshire’s residents more active
- COAT Progress Report End Year 1 (pdf format, 4.6 MB)
- Community Outreach Active Travel Progress Report End Year 2 FINAL.pdf
Together with the wider Place Shaping team, COAT goes from strength to strength, attracting additional funding from Active Travel England, which has secured its continuation into a fourth year. Crucially, this has enabled sustained behaviour change by allowing initiatives to run across consecutive years.
What is 'healthy place shaping'?
Healthy Place Shaping is Oxfordshire's approach to creating healthier, fairer and more sustainable places. It recognises that health is shaped not only by healthcare, but by the homes we live in, the streets we walk along, the opportunities available to us, the quality of our environment, and our connections with others.
We work with communities and partners across Oxfordshire to embed health, wellbeing and equity into decisions about housing, transport, planning, climate adaptation, regeneration and economic development. By doing so, we aim to tackle health inequalities, strengthen communities and support thriving places where everyone can flourish.
This approach can apply to new developments and to the regeneration of existing communities and involves action across these three areas:
- The built environment: shaping the built environment, public realm, green spaces and infrastructure at a local level to encourage healthy living
- Community activation: helping local people to live healthier lives with the support of community groups, schools, and employers
- New models of care: delivering new approaches to care closer to home and minimising hospital-based care.
Why Healthy Place Shaping matters
Health is shaped by far more than healthcare services alone. The homes we live in, the streets we walk along, access to nature, opportunities for employment, community connections and the quality of our local environment all influence our health and wellbeing. Across Oxfordshire, people experience significant differences in health outcomes, often linked to these wider determinants of health.
Healthy Place Shaping seeks to address these inequalities by embedding health, wellbeing and prevention into decisions about planning, housing, transport, climate action and community development. By creating places that support healthy lifestyles, social connection, resilience and sustainability, we can improve quality of life, reduce future demand on public services and help communities thrive for generations to come.
Watch a video about healthy place shaping
Video transcript
The current health and social care system is under a huge deal of pressure.
The population is growing, people are living longer and have more complex needs and health inequalities are widening.
To help reduce this burden, focussed efforts must be shifted to proactive well-being rather than reactive once care is needed.
The communities we live in, our housing, our built environment and our local economy all have a greater impact on how long and how well we live than medical care.
By shaping healthy places and preventing ill health we can reduce pressure on the health and social care system but also increase the economic prosperity and social wellbeing of the country.
A healthy place is somewhere individuals make healthy decisions easy fun and affordable. Where our social environments and networks make people feel supported and engaged.
Organisations and institutions work together to address the population's health.
The physical and built environment is designed to support an independent, safe and active lifestyle.
Policies across the area create the right environment and conditions for good health.
As the housing, planning and growth authorities, district councils hold many of the levers key to healthy place-shaping.
Districts bring residents and local services together, work with businesses to create vibrant local economies drive good standards of living through housing provision and adaptations and ensure residents have access to green spaces and active travel through planning and work with partners to encourage wider adoption of relevant policies.
Through our roles in shaping healthy places, we can help people maintain happier, healthier more independent lifestyles and reduce the need to access burdened health services
Through joined-up services and collaboration across our local areas, we can really make a difference and deliver better lives
Our ambition is to create healthy communities which reflect the UK Green Building Council’s concept of a healthy neighbourhood (pdf format)
These can help us deliver on our commitment to climate action by supporting active travel, sustainable development, and the creation of healthy, sustainable food systems.
Healthy Place Shaping supports Oxfordshire's climate ambitions by creating places that enable active travel, improve access to nature, reduce exposure to air pollution and extreme weather, and encourage low-carbon lifestyles. Many actions that improve health also support climate resilience and environmental sustainability.
The Future Oxfordshire Partnership Board was presented with an update on progress with the delivery of health place shaping across Oxfordshire. The Board confirmed its commitment to supporting this programme as a key mechanism for delivering its strategic vision for Oxfordshire.
At a national level, the Healthy Place Shaping principles we have developed and are using to reduce health inequality across the town were published in the Town & Country Planning Journal in April 2024 (pdf format, 1 MB)
Our partners
We are working with a wide range of partners on a programme of initiatives that will support residents to promote their health and wellbeing and to feel a sense of belonging to their community.
