UK: The Church’s Impact on Health and Care
Faith-based groups ‘increasingly stepping in to plug gaps in National Health Service.’ More than 3,500 churches and 200,000 volunteers are helping overstretched NHS, says study.
The Cinnamon Network undertook research to assess the effectiveness of church-led strategies which have been developed to offset pressures within the health service. The research focused on answering two key questions: 1. What impact do church communities currently have on health and social care? 2. What potential is there for them to be scalable and replicable, in order to have more impact? Both quantitative and qualitative research was conducted with a sample of ten church-led initiatives working within the areas of general health and wellbeing, mental health, perinatal care, loneliness and isolation, dementia and A&E response.