Search results matching tag 'planning'

You Are In For A 5% Raise. No Kidding.

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:00:05 GMT

“New & Improved” Isn’t Innovative

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 20:08:03 GMT

(AP) Redmond Washington. After a much heralded launch, the buzz around Microsoft’s launch of Windows 8.0 is centered on the fact that when the computer crashes that users will no longer see the blue screen of death. Instead, users will now see a friendly screen requesting that they restart their systems. “Which is why we [...]

IT Vendors: What’s not to like?

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 19:26:19 GMT

We were being entertained at a friend’s house whose interior looked like it had been designed by one of those overly made up, energetic divorcees who only take cash. The walls were painted a stark white; the overstuffed club chairs and the couch were upholstered in a soft white leather. The white carpet was thick [...]

When IT projects Fail

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:53:39 GMT

The mind is a terrible thing. Last night I stumbled across part of the movie Kill Bill Volume 2. There is a character in Volume 2 named Esteban Vihaio, an eighty-something Hispanic bon vivant. His is a small role, but performed beautifully. Uma Thurman, our ninja protagonist, meets Esteban and asks him ‘Where’s Bill?” With a [...]

Planning to be active: changing the way we live

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 09:05:10 GMT

Tweaking the planning system to emphasise the importance of public health could save money and lives

The debate over Olympic legacy and the controversy over the sell-off of school playing fields have thrown into sharp relief the question of how we get people to be more active, whether in competitive sports or informally.

The arguments seem to fall along a spectrum from the behavioural to the structural. On the one hand it's down to personal motivation and on the other that the way society and especially places are organised actually discourages physical activity.

The structural issues revolve around the question of whether the opportunity exists for physical activity. The phrase obesogenic environment was coined some time ago and it is characterised by a reliance on the private car, severance of neighbourhoods by roads, a high risk of road accidents and urban layouts that either privatise or exclude public space.

The question is, what is the most effective combination of the structural and the behavioural?

The benefits of physical activity have been known and valued for centuries. The value of physical exercise in pre and post heart attack patients and its contribution to tackling obesity are well understood. But there is still a disconnect between clinical and structural perspectives. A recent House of Lords report noted that GPs received little or no training in the value of physical activity and did not prioritise it.

A couple of years ago Nice, concerned by this, looked for evidence of the efficacy of measures to encourage physical activity and published a report concluding that the evidence was convincing. NHS Gloucestershire and local partners responded to that review and wanted to translate it into practical crosscutting guidance.

My colleague Rob Ballantyne and I, both practitioners in the rarified field of spatial planning and health, were commissioned to draw up some rules of thumb. The resulting toolkit looked at the evidence and pin pointed practical ways in which schools, cycling, transport and buildings design, the areas highlighted as instrumental by Nice, could be managed to facilitate physical activity.

The approach inevitably links planning – the management of the physical environment and public health in new ways. It is through spatial planning that standards can be set and better outcomes negotiated in housing, neighbourhoods, shopping and business areas.

Most planners, architects, designers and engineers will understand and factor in the need for movement and accessibility, but the crucial thing is to pay attention at all levels from the strategic down to the detail.

Walking and cycling need to be safe at the town scale but school playgrounds can and have been designed so that play is more spontaneous, multi-story buildings can be designed so that stairs are right in front of you, not hidden away in a dark corridor.

The toolkit is going from strength to strength. It brought many organisations together as it was developed and has recently won the regional Royal Town Planning award in the south west. It points the way to integrating physical activity in the way we organise our towns and neighbourhoods and maybe one route to Rio 2016.

Neil Blackshaw is

Poor Project Planning–Musings of a drive-by mind

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 15:24:04 GMT

It takes a lot of energy to dislike someone, but sometimes it is worth the effort. It is not easy being a consultant. One client required me to shout “unclean, unclean” as I passed through the hallways. Maybe that is why I leave newspapers scattered around the floor of my desk, so nobody can sneak [...]

Why it is time to reunite health and planning policy

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 13:30:01 GMT

Government has placed councils at the heart of the public health agenda, but planning must shoulder its burden of responsibility

The planning system first evolved as a result of the public health movement. Improved planning and better housing have long been identified as essential for improving the health of communities, reducing health inequalities and cutting costs for the taxpayer.

We know that having easy access to high-quality parks and gardens improves mental health and levels of physical activity. Yet often people living in the most deprived parts of England have less access to green space. They also experience the worst air quality, and are more likely to suffer from cardiorespiratory diseases. Better co-operation between planners and public health staff is important to identify these kinds of local health needs – and to find ways to tackle them.

Despite being rooted in public health, planning is a discipline that over recent decades has had little formal contact with health. Different workplace cultures, professional languages and reporting regimes have helped to exacerbate this divide. However, the government hopes this is about to change with widespread reforms to both the planning and health sectors, including a requirement on planners to work with public health organisations and a new public health responsibility for councils.

There are three reforms that set out a new responsibility for local authorities to be better on public health:

• The national planning policy framework – the overarching guidance for local authorities when drawing up plans and assessing development proposals – requires planners to promote healthy communities, use evidence to assess health and wellbeing needs, and work with public health leaders and organisations;

• The Health and Social Care Act 2012 transfers the responsibility for public health to upper-tier local authorities from April 2013. It also requires the creation of health and wellbeing boards to bring together key commissioners from the local NHS and local government to strategically plan local health and social care services;

• The Localism Act 2011 gives more power to communities, including the possibility of drawing up a neighbourhood plan. The act also introduces a raft of other changes that have implications for improving health, including shifts in the way affordable housing is provided and managed.

These reforms strengthen the argument for recognising and valuing the influence that planning, housing and other environmental functions have on improving health and wellbeing, and in reducing health inequalities.

There are already emerging examples of good practice and innovation, and councils are taking varying approaches to meet local circumstances. However, there is a concern that, with local areas having to take on so much change at the same time, aspirations to improve the way professionals work together might be subsumed by the detail of internal restructuring and the difficult consequences for budgets, jobs, procedures and workload.

For planners, corporate responsibility for public health is an opportunity to exploit. By building on existing work, especially their track record of responding to the climate change agenda and promoting environmental sustainability (both of which have important overlaps with improving health), planners can get more influence by showing how they can help to meet this important new corporate objective for councils.

It is essential that councils, who now find themselves at the forefront of public health, grasp this agenda and reconnect planning and health to improve the wellbeing of both people and places.

Kate Henderson is chief executive of the Town & Country Planning Association (TCPA). The TCPA recently published a new handbook, Reuniting Health With Planning: healthier homes, healthier communities

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EHR–“Our Lady of Perpetual Implementations”

Anonymous — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:06:17 GMT

“There is no use trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” There are a number of [...]

Public health: bridging the cultural faultlines

Anonymous — Wed, 09 May 2012 08:00:04 GMT

Planning has disengaged with public health, but evidence points to a link between fast food shops and local obesity

With public health moving back into the remit of local government next year, there is a huge opportunity to move towards a more "holistic" understanding of health – yet in many health circles, the term holistic is still seen as a mumbo jumbo, catch-all term.

For councils, the word means that health is not just about providing a stop-smoking service; its about parks and green spaces, schools and youth centres, exercise and local food outlets. In short, it covers everything that a local authority can do something about.

Taking on public health is a daunting prospect. There's the initial hurdle of managing unfamiliar issues, such as obesity, sexual health and drinking, and then there's the fear of confronting a strong medical leadership. We all trust our doctors (or at least, 88% of us do, according to Ipsos MORI), so which council leader in their right mind is going to want to question a doctor's understanding of public health issues?

Fundamentally, there's the very real issue of bridging the cultural faultline which public health has been built upon: the need to move from seeing a person as a patient to seeing them as a citizen. As a council colleague once told me: "The NHS treats people; in councils, we serve them." Faced with this dichotomy, it would be tempting for a council to absorb the director of public health role into adult social services, let the doctors and their clinical commissioning groups dictate what should be done and roll over.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Many public health tools and levers are already in local government's hands; it's just a question of building on what they already know.

Take a case in point: planning. It's one of the key functions of local government, it's something all authorities have an interest in, and it's a simple entry point into public health. To date, public health considerations have been largely left out of the picture, with many planning departments emerging as disengaged from the thinking already taking place within shadow health and wellbeing boards.

The link between public health and planning, however, was explicitly recognised both by the Marmot Review into health inequalities, and the public health white paper. Equally importantly, a recent Nice review recommended the integration of health and planning. Making the link between the two could actually save councils money.

If you're seeking to tackle obesity, while there are clear roles for public information campaigns and for dietary health services, there is also plenty of evidence to link the number of fast food outlets in an area and levels of obesity among the local population.

This makes a compelling case for planning departments to become actively involved in the management of obesity through the development of comprehensive planning policies which restrict any over-concentration of hot-food takeaways.

Health-proofing planning policy is only once part of the jigsaw. But by beginning to make those links between what it knows how to do and its new public health responsibilities, a council can not only demonstrate that it can bring something new to public health, but it can also begin to build that bridge across the public health faultline.

Oswin Baker is director of Rockpool Research Associates

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ICD-10′s Hidden Cost

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:15:59 GMT

The characters on the train into Philadelphia, while never dull, were more interesting than usual this morning. The woman across the aisle from me wore her hair in a style that could be described best as resembling a termite mound. The ride felt so much like bumper cars that I was tempted to ask the [...]