Neighbourhood Health: community engagement awards

The NHS 10 Year Plan for England prioritises a shift towards neighbourhood health, aiming to deliver more care in the community, using technology to support patients and staff, and focusing on preventing ill health.

Halving the healthy life expectancy gap
The plan aims to reduce the disparity in healthy life expectancy between the wealthiest and poorest areas.

Empowering patients
The plan emphasises giving individuals more control over their care and supporting them in making informed decisions.

Creating healthier communities
The focus is on improving the overall health and well-being of communities by addressing social determinants of health.

Improving access to care
The plan aims to ensure that everyone has access to the care they need, when and where they need it.

This is by no means exclusive to England and the policy direction is mirrored in the health and social care policy of the other three countries of the UK and indeed globally.

For simplicity, we use ‘nurse’ to refer collectively to nurses, midwives, and health visitors registered with the NMC. We value all members of the nursing family and have chosen the term nurse for readability.

Nurses as leaders in neighbourhood health

Nurses play a central leadership role in preventative health and social care.  There are countless examples of nurses doing extraordinary work from enabling compassionate communities to outreach from A&E or engaging with those who are homeless through street soccer.

The Burdett Trust for Nursing is keen to connect and enable nursing entrepreneurship so we can stretch, inspire and ignite the imagination of others and together make a discernible difference to the health of individuals, families and communities.

We have chosen to use the term neighbourhood but this does not mean we are only looking at geographical communities; it could be a community of people with learning disabilities, a group of care home residents, a faith community or a school community.

Small grants (awards) as a catalyst for co-production

At the heart of this programme is co-production. As nurses we are great at problem solving and sometimes, we need to listen more to the perspectives of others. The purpose is to support nurse led initiatives which seek to be salutogenic and address health inequity. These awards are designed to enable engagement with citizens.

The grants are intended to enhance ongoing projects or launch new ones, with an emphasis on nursing leadership in interprofessional community health innovation.

What can be funded?

The proposed activity must:

• Be focused on improving health for under-served or minoritised communities.
• Build on existing evidence.
• Have a clear purpose, e.g. informing a project proposal or health related improvement programme.
• Enable public, patient or community engagement and co-production.
• Be connected to a neighbourhood or community-based health initiative, involving a range of stakeholders across agencies and professions.

Eligible costs include:

• Payments to public contributors for their time.
• Venue hire and refreshments for engagement activities.
• Facilitators or creative practitioners to enable all voices to be heard.
• Consumables for engagement events.
• Costs to support inclusion, such as interpreters, translation, carer support, or travel.
• Implementation of co-created plans.
• Production of resources developed through community engagement.
• Dissemination activities within the community or health system.

Please note, funds may not be used for research, education, or conference attendance.

Who can apply?

• Any nurse, midwife or health visitor working in health and social care in the UK who has executive level support from their employing organisation.
• The applicant will need the support of a host organisation who can manage the funds.

How much is available?

We are offering small grants of up to £10,000. We have £100,000 available for 2026 so we can offer many more grants of two or three thousand pounds. Please consider the amount needed to achieve your purpose, recognising that you may have a higher chance of being successful if you request a smaller amount.

Ongoing support

We will invite all those who are awarded grants to join a community of practice to connect with others, to share their journeys and learn from experts.

We believe that this will add significant value to the awards and therefore will ask project leads to commit to engaging with this community of support as part of the grant offer.

How to Write a Great Grant Application