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Healthy Homes, Healthier Lives:
About this initiative

The Healthy Homes, Healthier Lives initiative aims to improve health through promoting better housing conditions. A major objective is to raise awareness of the negative effects poor housing can have upon people’s health and well being and increase knowledge of what can be done to tackle poor housing.

Health and Social Care staff who visit people in their own homes can play a crucial role in this process, by ensuring that anyone living in poor housing can access the help that is available to bring about improvements.

The Healthy Homes resources (in most cases downloadable from this site) explore the issues and provide information about the services and resources that may be available to help householders improve their housing conditions. They include:

  • Healthy Homes, Healthier Lives Training Kit for a full training session
  • Healthy Homes, Healthier Lives Presentation Kit for shorter events
  • A Healthy Homes Self Training Toolkit
  • A Healthy Homes Pack for Older People for use in short interactive sessions with older people’s groups
  • A Healthy Homes, Healthier Lives film and support materials available as a DVD or CD Rom
  1. The Programme

    1.1 The overall aim of Healthy Homes, Healthier Lives is to improve the health and well being of people living in poor or unsuitable housing conditions by developing the public health role of front line statutory and voluntary sector health and social care staff. In order to achieve this the programme has the following objectives:

    • to develop and provide materials and resources to support the delivery of training sessions that will raise awareness amongst front line health & social care staff (voluntary & statutory sector) about the health impact of poor housing conditions and possible remedial actions;

    • to develop the wider public health role of Health Visitors, District Nurses and others in health and social care, particularly those in positions that involve visiting people in their own homes;

    • to develop a specific housing module for inclusion in the training of health and social care staff to enable them to better assess the housing needs of clients as part of the Single Assessment Process;

    • to raise awareness amongst older and disabled people about the wider health impact of housing conditions and of possible ways to improve those conditions.

    1.2 The Healthy Homes, Healthier Lives national programme builds upon the experience of the Bristol Care & Repair Service and their successful (Department of Health Award winning) 'Healthy Homes Assessment Training'.
  2. Programme Activities

    2.1 Between 2004 and 2008 the programme produced a comprehensive range of training materials and resources, suitable for use by front line staff in a variety of practise settings.

    2.2 Workshops and training sessions were held throughout England for staff from Primary Care Trusts, Social Services, Housing Departments, Home Improvement Agencies, Hospitals, Red Cross, Age Concern and other voluntary organisations.

    2.3 Through liaison with nationally recognised institutions such as the Royal Institute of Public Health, Open University, Royal College of Nursing, the University of the West of England and others materials to support the introduction of a Healthy Homes Assessment module into the training of public health professionals were produced.

    2.4 Healthy Homes and self help materials were produced for use in pre-retirement courses and by those working with older people’s groups.

    Supported by:
    The Rayne Foundation The Change Agent Team Housing LIN.