Alliance Health Plus announces new community initiatives arm

Alliance Health Plus announces new community initiatives arm

Alliance Health Plus Trust (AH+) today announced the establishment of Alliance Community Initiatives Trust (ACIT).

As one of NZ’s high performing primary health organisations AH+ is based in Mt Wellington and specialises in primary health care for Pasifika and high needs populations. AH+ will continue to build its general practice network aiming to deliver top class services.

The AH+ Board has established ACIT to help build the world’s finest society by improving one social determinant of wellbeing at a time for one person at a time in one NZ community at a time. For now the community is Mangere. This requires a systematic, grass roots, bottom-up portfolio of interventions with appropriate safety nets and buffers to create new social capital, health equity and overall well-being in Pasifika, Maori and high needs communities. Incorporated this month ACIT is a standalone charitable trust with its own Board and management.

AH+ Chairman, Mr Uluomatootua (Ulu) Aiono ONZM, says ACIT is an element in the AH+ Board’s thoughtful development of a structure the Board believes will be a platform for identifying and solving many of the social determinants for health and well-being in NZ’s extremely diverse society. 40% of Auckland’s population, and 23% of NZ’s population, was born overseas. NZ society has an unacceptably high rate of growth in the unacceptably high numbers of vulnerable and high needs people.

“Complex health and well-being problems require common denominator solutions that cut across multiple domains including social, economic, cultural and environmental.”

“At both AH+ and ACIT we know gains are temporary unless we identify the common denominator and eliminate the root cause through critical thinking based grass roots interventions in the demand side. A critical prerequisite for this is collaboration amongst frontline service providers. This has to be

coordinated effectively with and supported by intelligent, people-first, central and local Government policies for place based strategies and initiatives. The initiatives must develop flexible, adjustably granular pathways of change for individuals, families and communities. Flexibility is a property of intelligent, people-first, policy. Adjustable granularity is a property of demand side systems and their ethic,” says Mr Aiono.

Mr Aiono says ACIT builds on the reputation and outstanding success of AH+.

“The two organisations will work together sharing know-how, critical thinking tools and systems, intellectual property, IT strategy, policy knowledge, project management systems, common denominator expertise and marketing opportunities.”

Mr Aiono says ACIT’s complementarily with AH+ aligns with the Government’s social investment approach: that service delivery should focuses resources from many areas on those who need them the most.

“What sets us apart from many national and local agencies which, perhaps, like us, are attempting to navigate complex health/well-being issues, is that we don’t minimise the complexity or make the usual noises about searching for simple solutions. By contrast, at ACIT, as fast as possible, we aim to progressively and continuously collect the demand side data needed to identify common denominators and pin down the root cause. Then we will be able to develop the insights and bottom-up interventions of adjustable granularity suitable firstly for helping an individual to help themself, then a family or immediate social group and then a community group or community. If we are smart in choosing our partners, sponsors, funders, staff and volunteers, we’ll coordinate and dovetail our insights and interventions with Government agencies and their top-down approaches.”

“AH+ has established itself as a primary health care leader in Pasifika and vulnerable communities. Now we want ACIT to develop similarly high levels of knowledge and expertise as well as the track record of worthwhile outcomes that partners and funders expect. We’re confident ACIT will make that happen. It will be a platform on which we can collaborate and implement innovative interventions resulting in genuine improvements of well-being, effective social participation and advancement for individuals, families and communities,” says Mr Aiono.

ENDS.

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