Had a lot of fun last week discussing our paper 'Systems thinking in, and for, public health: a call for a broader path' with the very friendly Wider Determinants of Health community of interest facilitated by Public Health Wales. The paper is open access here: academic.oup.com/heapro/artic... - ThreadSky

ericagadsby.bsky.social • 96 days ago

Had a lot of fun last week discussing our paper 'Systems thinking in, and for, public health: a call for a broader path' with the very friendly Wider Determinants of Health community of interest facilitated by Public Health Wales. The paper is open access here: https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article/39/4/daae086/7732163

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epicstoic.bsky.social•96 days ago

Thank you for sharing. Quite interesting.

Also ref:

https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/220811pk.pdf

ericagadsby.bsky.social•96 days ago

It was great to hear positive experiences that could be characterised as 'broad path', to discuss barriers in pursuing this path where it would be relevant to do so, and to identify potential actions that could make the broad path easier more of the time. Big thanks to everyone who came and to PHW!

ericagadsby.bsky.social•96 days ago

We felt that in each case, in our experience, the narrow path is the more dominant. In last week's workshop, this feeling was largely supported, though there were some really interesting examples of 'broad path' practice that we clearly need to hear more about.

ericagadsby.bsky.social•96 days ago

So, we articulated two paths in a duality: a 'broad path', within which a 'narrow path' is encompassed. We discussed the contrasts between a narrow and broad path in relation to the nature of transformation, partnership working, legitimacy and change, and the role of ideas and tools from Systems.

ericagadsby.bsky.social•96 days ago

3) the framing of the problem to which systems approaches are being applied is usually starting with diseases or risks to health, rather than wellbeing and inequalities. (We can see this in all the 'whole systems approaches to ... obesity, tooth decay, physical activity, falls prevention, etc.)

ericagadsby.bsky.social•96 days ago

2) systems approaches/methods are generally being adopted by researchers, often at the beginning of an intervention, rather than as an ongoing collective learning process (Ray Ison's depiction of a person 'spying systems she can engineer' comes to mind https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-84996-125-7).

ericagadsby.bsky.social•96 days ago

Helen and I wrote this paper because, over a long period of discussions, we came to realise 3 things: 1) public health communities tend to engage with a relatively narrow set of ideas and tools from Systems; there are whole lineages of Systems yet to be discovered. https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2023/11/22/tb872-systems-lineages/

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