Social enterprises and public health improvement in England: a qualitative case study

Abstract

Social enterprises have an increasing role in providing potential solutions to intractable health improvement challenges, contributing to a broader vision around upstream action for health. However, the fragmentation and growing outsourcing of public health has risks for coherent and equitable service planning.

An Organizational Approach to Understanding How Social Enterprises Address Health Inequities: A Scoping Review

“…Australian governments have not been far behind, with the launch of a nation-wide Social Enterprise Development and Investment Fund in 2011, and by recently launching a Social Enterprise Strategy (2017) and Social Procurement Framework (2018) in the state of Victoria. While social enterprises are attracting investment from governments, scholars warn that there is still inconclusive evidence of whether and how social enterprises produce positive social impacts, including whether and how they alleviate health inequities (Agafonow 2018;Calo et al 2018;Garnett et al 2018;Roy et al 2018).…”

Risk ambassadors and saviours: Children and futuring public health interventions

“…In the case of Breathe London, the technology company who successfully bid to develop the monitor is also a producer of air purifiers. Such coalitions of actors are increasingly evident in many contemporary health interventions (Garnett et al., 2018). Yet the roles of these actors were largely invisible in our data as contributors to risk and only positioned as contributors to solutions.…”

“…BH and JG were involved in data collection for The Daily Mile, and EG facilitated participatory workshops for the Breathe London study which formed a case study of her wider project on air pollution sensing for public health. Working alongside each other as colleagues, we saw overlap between our studies in the ways in which children were ‘responsibilised’ for future health, in the light of broader shifts we had been exploring relating to the roles of philanthropic capital in public health (Garnett et al., 2018; Green, 2019). This prompted a collaborative re‐analysis, to bring together our respective findings on intervention implementation.…”

“…This paper draws on two cases that arise from these kinds of coalitions for ‘futuring’ public health projects, which are increasingly, in the UK at least (Garnett et al., 2018), reliant on social enterprises and commercial actors for design and delivery. The first intervention, The Daily Mile, addressed physical activity through an intervention based on a 15‐min running or jogging activity that is included into the class day.…”