Living Well UK: Transforming community mental health systems

Inspired by Living Well Lambeth, a person-centred, holistic neighbourhood approach to supporting people’s mental health, our goal was to spread and scale the model to four localities across the UK, supported by the National Lottery Community Fund. 

Across Salford, Tameside and Glossop, Edinburgh and Luton, Living Well systems support people who too often fall through the gaps: those considered ‘too complex’ for primary care, ‘not unwell enough’ for secondary care, or stuck on long waiting lists for medicalised support that overlooks the social factors affecting their mental health.

The impact

The impact of Living Well for people accessing support is significant: 

• People get help sooner. People accessing Living Well waited just 14–25 days for support – compared with nearly one in four people waiting over 12 weeks for standard services.
• Quality of life improves. Across sites, 60% of people experienced a meaningful improvement in their health and quality of life.
• It’s cost-effective and sustainable. Every £800–£1,160 spent on Living Well delivers a measurable improvement in people’s quality of life – below the NICE benchmark for cost-effective care.
• People make real progress on their own goals. On average, people made progress on 3 - 3.5 f of the personal goals they set for themselves.
• Connections and confidence grow. In Tameside and Glossop, the number of people who said they have a close friend rose from 66% to 81%, and participation in community or leisure activities nearly doubled (26% to 48%)

The approach

In each of the four sites, Innovation Unit brought people from across the system together to build trust, strengthen relationships and work differently. We helped partners adopt the key features of Lambeth’s original Living Well approach and adapt them to fit local realities. 

Through prototyping, we created multidisciplinary neighbourhood teams that build shared practice across health, care and community services, supporting people as whole individuals, not defined by diagnosis. Each system was co-designed to harness local community strengths and relationships, ensuring support was available in everyday places and that there was a shared focus on person-centred outcomes and tackling inequalities. By testing new forms of shared governance, we strengthened local practice, built sustainable ways of working and ensured the Living Well approach could last.

Growing the model 

Following this programme, we also worked with Greater Manchester and Derbyshire to adopt and scale the Living Well model across their entire regions.