Neighbourhood Health and the opportunity for collaboration with faith groups
In December 2025, the Good Faith Partnership co-hosted a roundtable with the National Academy of Social Prescribing (NASP).
This roundtable brought together key leaders across the health, wellbeing and faith sectors and built upon the launch of our previous report produced in partnership with Theos: 'Creating a Neighbourhood Health Service: the role of churches and faith groups in social prescribing'.
Since the launch of our report in January 2025, the NHS 10-Year Health Plan has been released which brings with it a renewed focus on the importance of neighbourhoods- delivering care in the community, preventing illness and promoting wellbeing, and unlocking the value of communities in health creation.
Social Prescribing was introduced across NHS England in 2019 and refers to a process through which individuals can be referred by those in clinical or community settings to non-medical support in order to support their broader wellbeing needs. This often looks like a GP passing individuals on to a Social Prescribing Link Worker who can help the patient identify non-medical support that would be most helpful for them. Socially prescribed activities have been seen by the NHS to fall into four categories of: engaging with nature, exercise and activity, arts and culture, and practical advice.
NHS 10-year Health Plan
Social Prescribing will be integrated into the implementation of the NHS 10-Year Health Plan as it plays a clear role in preventing sickness and promoting community connections. Faith communities have been offering activities that can be socially prescribed, in local neighbourhoods for generations. The shift to preventative health care, integrated into neighbourhoods and unlocking the potential of communities is an exciting opportunity to embed faith communities at the heart of service design.
This opportunity was the key focus of the roundtable discussion and the subsequent report produced by the Good Faith Partnership and NASP. The report details the challenges faced by faith groups when it comes to integrating into Neighbourhood Health delivery in addition to the strategic opportunities to move forward in this area. These include embedding the assets of faith groups in the design of Neighbourhood Health, recognising the value of chaplaincy and spiritual care, building the evidence base for the value of faith in health creation, developing sustainable funding mechanisms for faith groups, and encouraging relationship building across local government and faith communities.
Working in partnership
Framing both the roundtable discussion and the subsequent report has been the importance of genuine partnership and reciprocity. If the NHS 10-Year Health Plan is to bring about significant change in outcomes for individuals and communities, Neighbourhood Health needs to deliver something qualitatively different to previous NHS delivery systems. Those present at the roundtable agreed that this would involve a shift to genuine shared ownership of ‘health and wellbeing’ across sectors such that faith partners, among others, were seen to be as valuable in bringing about health outcomes as clinical health services. This would be seen in joint problem definition and collaborative design from the output, strategic commissioning of faith services in wellbeing provision, and exchanges of training, resources and knowledge.
With rapid development of Integrated Neighbourhood Teams and design of Neighbourhood Health delivery across the 43 trailblazer areas, the launch of this report is timely. The time to engage with faith groups and explore genuine collaboration across sectors is now if we are going to harness the opportunity to improve outcomes for all.
This report builds upon our research 'Creating a Neighbourhood Health Service: the role of churches and faith groups in social prescribing', released by Theos and the Good Faith Partnership in 2025. This sits alongside our ‘how to’ guides for Faith Leaders and Social Prescribing Link Workers.