PHE 26 August 2021
- Community champions or health champions are active community members who draw on their local knowledge, skills and life experience to promote health and wellbeing or improve conditions in their local community. They address barriers to engagement and improve connections between services and disadvantaged communities. Many local areas have developed community champion programmes to help support their local coronavirus (COVID-19) response.
- This rapid scoping review pulls together and considers existing research evidence on community champions approaches, both from the UK and internationally.
- Overall, findings show that:
- champion approaches are highly relevant to reducing health inequalities in a range of contexts
- there a range of different models and ways of building community champion programmes
- these approaches can be applied flexibly to meet local needs and assets champions can be key connectors in communities but these roles do not operate in isolation and need to be embedded in effective community engagement strategies