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Today marks 75 years of the NHS!

It is a time to celebrate our past, but more importantly, a time to think about a future where we continue to support the principles of the NHS Constitution. The NHS is founded on a common set of principles and values that bind together the communities and people it serves – patients and public – and the staff who work for it. We in Solving Together follow these principles and fully involve patients, staff, families, carers, communities, and professionals inside and outside the NHS.

There has been a grand total of more than 300,000 interactions with the communities and people the NHS serves since Solving Together launched in 2022. We’d like to take a moment to celebrate this milestone and share our thanks with everyone in the Solving Together community for their continued engagement and involvement.

Volunteers of all ages and backgrounds make a huge contribution to the health and wellbeing of the nation, sharing their time, compassion and expertise to support the NHS, charities, faith groups and communities. Why not join them as we mark 75 years of the NHS? As we shared in last week's update, Hospital Discharge crowdsourcing has contributed to the NHS Care Responders programme which involves creating an NHS ‘volunteer army’ to take medicines into people’s homes, carry out shopping and other errands to support people to be discharged from hospital earlier in the day.

Coproduction week 2023

Coproduction is at the heart of Solving Together, with people who use services and people who provide services involved at every single step of the process.

We’re very excited this week to be supporting National Co-production Week . On Thursday, Gillian Driscoll, our Community Mobilisation Lead in the Solving Together team will be joining a webinar to talk about how the Solving Together approach is underpinned by co-production, with opportunities for everyone to be part of the crowdsourcing and development of big ideas, to improve our health services. For more details and to book your free place on the session, see this page: Co-production at the heart of QI & Nurturing Capability .

Get Involved….

As part of the NHS75 birthday celebrations, the NHS across the UK has teamed up with parkrun with ‘parkrun for the NHS’ over the weekend of 8 and 9 July. Anyone can get involved with people invited to walk, jog or run 5K at their local parkrun to celebrate this major milestone in the NHS’ history.

There’s a huge parkrun fan in the Solving Together team...me! Find out why I recommend parkrun in this idea self-refer to park run . I shared this idea as part of the crowdsourcing for self-referral to Community Health Services crowdsourcing. There are lots more ideas and discussions about self-referral to community health services available on the Solving Together platform.

We all know the benefits of physical exercise to keep us healthy, and in “Taking a bold leap to embed physical activity in health systems”, Tom Underwood from NHS Horizons tells us about an initiative with Sport England and OPID (Office for Health Improvement and Disparities), around embedding physical activity within health systems, to help people to stay healthy and to support the management of long-term conditions. The blog includes an acknowledgement of Solving Together's contribution to the programme in helping spot connections, bringing partners together and introducing new voices, skills and experiences to learn from.

Continuing the conversations and staying connected

We have a very active presence on social media. For the latest news and to stay connected with the Solving Together community, keep in touch through our channels: Twitter, Instagram,  LinkedIn and Facebook   or contact us at england.solvingtogether@nhs.net  

The Solving Together team hopes this update has been helpful. We look forward to keeping in touch with you and your networks.

This post was edited on Jul 5, 2023 by Leigh Kendall