From rhetoric to reality: A systemic approach to understanding the constraints faced by Health For All initiatives in England

The increased appreciation of the effects socio-ecological factors have on health, witnessed over the last few decades, has given rise to many international, national, and local Health For All (HFA) initiatives tasked with addressing them. However, such initiatives have had to operate within environments which were not specifically designed for them or for the new social (rather than medical) perspective on health they were based upon. As a result, they have been facing significant barriers and constraints to fulfilling their mission. This paper explores the constraints which are imposed on such initiatives by the various environments within which they are nested. Drawing upon our experience in evaluating European Healthy City (HC) projects and English Health Action Zones (HAZs), we develop a dynamic conceptual model which shows how the national, governmental policy, interorganisational, organisational, and initiative environments relate with each other and their cumulative effects on initiatives. We argue that this model, and the principles on which it is based, can be used constructively to identify constraints facing HFA-type initiatives in many countries. We use our case study of English HCs and HAZs to illustrate the applicability of the model in a particular national context. We, first, interpret the model to reflect differences and similarities between their respective environments and trace the sources of the different constraints they encountered. We, then, show how an alternative structural configuration could enable some of these constraints to be eliminated. We argue that what is needed for HFA initiatives to be able to fulfill their brief in full is for governments to rethink existing organisational structures and update them to match the evolution of ideas on health which have emerged over the last decades.