Dover District Health and Wellbeing Alliance

Helping people live healthy, happy lives.

Who we are

Staying healthy and living a good life are essential to us all. The Dover District Health and Wellbeing Alliance is a partnership of equals comprised of a diverse range of organisations that have a role in improving the health and wellbeing of people who live or work in the district. 

The Dover District Health and Wellbeing Alliance is open to colleagues across the statutory, private, and third sectors interested in improving health, reducing health inequalities, or addressing the wider determinants of health and wellbeing.

Core members invited include but are not limited to, representatives from NHS organisations (such as Primary Care Networks and the East Kent Health and Care Partnership), Kent County Council (such as Public Health, Education, Adult Social Care, and Children's Services), Dover District Council (such as Housing and Planning), Town, and Parish Councils, Department for Work and Pensions, Kent Police, Kent  Fire and Rescue, Voluntary, Community, and Social Enterprises, to meet the needs of the communities they serve.  

The Dover District Health and Wellbeing Alliance is managed by Dover District Council and Kent County Council Public Health.  

Our Aims

The role of the Dover District Health and Wellbeing Alliance is to: 

• Catalyse collaborative actions that improve health and wellbeing and address local health inequalities. 
• Feed into the East Kent Wellbeing and Health Improvement Partnership (a subgroup of the East Kent Health and Care Partnership, which is, in turn, part of the Kent and Medway Integrated Care System), providing insight and expertise to shape policy, strategy, and commissioning, for the benefit of local people.
• Identify and raise awareness of gaps in service provision, meeting these needs where possible or feeding back to relevant stakeholders. 
• Agree on goals for prioritised action, and members, where they can, will make the best efforts to enable delivery through their organisations and spheres of influence.
• Enable members to share ideas, best practices, information, and knowledge to seek solutions and create healthy communities. 
• Promote and highlight the contributions of voluntary, community and social enterprises (VCSE) towards improving health and wellbeing and help smaller VCSE organisations engage with the NHS and statutory services.  

Meetings  

We held our first meeting on 24 April 2024, when we agreed on a Terms of Reference. 

Our Alliance is new, and we are still figuring out the best way to achieve our aims and involve the wider community. Therefore, we will keep the Terms of Reference under review and amend them as necessary. 

The Alliance plans to meet each quarter.  Meetings may be themed to target specific priorities (with guest speakers/participants) or be networking events open to more interested parties to allow conversations that matter to our communities and inform ongoing work.

We may set up sub-groups/task and finish groups to advance specific priorities and report to the wider group. 

Priorities 

We are currently working on the priorities and action plan for the Alliance.  

Join us

Your expertise and experience in health improvement, reducing health inequalities, or tackling the wider determinants of health and wellbeing are invaluable to our Alliance. We invite you to join us and contribute to our shared mission.

To join, please email community@dover.gov.uk with your name, organisation/department, reasons for joining and areas of particular interest.