Why community cohesion is an important issue for people working in Health services

The legal context

There is no specific legal duty, like that placed on schools, requiring NHS bodies to promote community cohesion. However, community cohesion consists of a package of issues and policy objectives many of which carry a statutory duty or a policy incentive. A focus on community cohesion is therefore an effective way of complying with those specific duties and achieving a set of desired results. Here are some examples of those elements of a community cohesion package that carry a statutory duty: 

• There is a legal duty to contribute to strategic partnerships and Local Area Agreements. Many LAAs have now adopted one or more of the national performance indicators on community cohesion so, where this is the case, there is a legal duty to contribute to cohesion through that route.
• There is a legal obligation on NHS bodies to consult the public on a range of policy and service issues. Since community engagement is at the core of community cohesion this makes it part of the cohesion package.
• Like other public bodies, NHS institutions have a duty to comply with a range of anti-discrimination laws (race, disability, gender etc). Again these are central to the cohesion package. Community cohesion is broader than any of the individual areas of equality and diversity because it is concerned with how communities relate to each other as well as the rights of specific "minority" groups.

In addition to any legal duties, the case for a focus on community cohesion rests on three other key arguments: the first is that community cohesion is an important contributor to health; the second is that health is an important contributor to community cohesion and the third is that community cohesion can contribute to the achievement of several other key NHS priorities.