OxHA is a partner in a consortium to run the new NHS London: Healthy World Cities (HWC) initiative, designed to promote information exchange and policy learning among ‘world cities’ and improve health and reduce health inequalities.
HWC will do this by developing a dialogue among the city governments, public health and health care communities, identifying actionable health measures, benchmarking performance, identifying effective practices and stimulating coordinated action between London, New York and Hong Kong.
These three conurbations are considered world cities by virtue of their strategic economic and political importance – and they share some characteristics and problems.
- As centres for specialised financial and legal services, media and culture, they exercise a powerful influence throughout the world.
- World cities are characterised by large disparities in wealth, income, housing and health. Their inhabitants are heterogeneous, including some of the wealthiest and poorest citizens of their respective nations, and they attract and channel the ‘creative classes’ that contribute to innovation and economic growth. They provide high levels of public services and public transportation and they attract people from extensive metropolitan regions and from around the world.
- These cities have many educational institutions and clinical resources. Their hospitals often serve as national, even global, centres of excellence. Their citizens have access to the best of their nation’s education, medicine, and culture ... yet the health outcomes for major cities lag behind.
There is already a vast literature about Hong Kong, London, New York and other world cites, but comparative studies of all three are scarce, and those that exist have not examined their health care systems and population health.
The HWC initiative will attempt to create a framework for measuring and improving the health of cities, identifying effective community-wide health improvement initiatives and convening local government, public health departments, health systems and employers to investigate how to improve the health of urban populations. It is focused on city-wide improvement and not simply on measurement and comparison. HWC will make as much as it can of the data that exist, and will collect new relevant, timely and actionable data to engage local authorities, health system managers, and communities. This is an action project, and not just an exercise in data gathering and comparative study. Finally, HWC will focus on disparities in health outcomes and health prospects among their diverse populations.
Partners
The partners in the Healthy World Cities Consortium, assembled by the International Longevity Centre, include: Humana, Dr Foster Intelligence, the Oxford Health Alliance, the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, the University of New York, New York Academy of Medicine and the University of Hong Kong.