RSPH has launched a new commissioning guide for promoting health and well-being. The launch took place in central London and brought ogether many noted public health professionals including Sir Muir Gray, Director of The National Knowledge Service who gave the keynote speech.

Sir Muir believes the Guide will be essential in helping Primary Care Trusts to commission services to promote health and well-being and reduce inequalities. He commented: “This Guide will help people do good work more efficiently and will prevent a waste of resources, I strongly recommend Primary Care Trusts should not take action without reading the Guide first.”

The Guide, which has been developed by the RSPH in partnership with the National Social Marketing Centre, with funding from the English Department of Health, is available to download from the RSPH website (www.rsph.org.uk/commissioning). RSPH will also work to support the Guide with national dissemination and training via its courses.

Practical and accessible, the Guide is based on the many developments that have taken place in the practice of health promotion and social marketing in recent years. It draws on an integrated model of health promotion and social marketing. The value and characteristics of effective health promotion and social marketing are explained, and the Guide includes tools and techniques to help to attain those characteristics, as well as case studies of how to commission to achieve the best outcomes.

The Guide will assist commissioners in choosing and fully utilising the best methods of promoting health, as it is written with the latest understanding of how commissioners can support people to make healthy choices as individuals within the social and environmental contexts in which they live.

Richard Shircore, Programme Manager and Lead Author, commented on the importance of the Guide: “This exciting ‘toolkit’ is a huge step forward in providing commissioning guidance to the sector to improve population health. Advice and guidance on commissioning for health improvement has been relatively neglected in the past and this Guide has been developed to fill an important gap”.