Darlington Healthy New Towns programme

Healthy New Towns (HNT) was a two-year (2016-18) NHS England initiative to rethink how health and care services could be delivered from an environmental perspective.  Darlington was selected as one of ten national exemplar HNT sites.  The Darlington HNT Collaborative was formed to deliver the initiative, and comprised Darlington Borough Council (as lead agency), Darlington Clinical Commissioning Group, County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust and Tees Esk and Wear Valley NHS Foundation Trust.

AskFuse supported this enquiry by publicising the request to researchers in the Fuse network.  AskFuse also facilitated discussions between Darlington HNT Collaborative and Fuse researchers from Durham and Newcastle Universities, to scope an evaluation plan for the programme.

This scoping work, supported by AskFuse, resulted in:

• A framework for the evaluation of the Darlington HNT programme, which identified short term outcomes and critical success factors for improving health and wellbeing in the future delivery of the programme
• Identifying ways to improve the health and wellbeing of residents through review of the existing evidence, and stakeholder interviews
• Recommendations on how successful outcomes could be achieved and recorded
• New collaborations between the local authority and primary/secondary care health trusts organisations
• Developing research capacity by using embedded researchers for the evaluation
• Identifying evidence gaps where more research was needed
• Reporting the results of the scoping work to the commissioners at the Public Health England (North of England) Health Inequalities Conference on October 2017
• A Fuse brief research summary, aimed at policy and practice partners.

As a result of the scoping work, Fuse researchers were commissioned by Darlington Borough Council to undertake an embedded research project to implement the evaluation plan, which started in January 2018 for 12 months.

For more information, please contact:
AskFuse manager: Peter van der Graaf
Phone: 01642 342757
Email: p.van.der.Graaf@tees.ac.uk

• Brief: Darlington Healthy New Towns - evaluating the building of a healthy community

Last modified: Wed, 24 Mar 2021 10:36:58 GMT