The CHEX team are currently pulling together resources and outputs from the conference to share with you all so watch this space!

This year we focused on the urgent need to move beyond ambition and into reality.

The conference followed the publication of a joint statement in late 2025, issued by CHEX and our colleagues from across the sector, on the role prevention plays in tackling Scotland’s growing health inequalities crisis.

What does it take to make community-led health happen?

We have heard much policy ambition, but finding practical and sustainable solutions to this ‘implementation gap’ is essential. Delegates discussed what we need to do to ensure that policy and practice are informed by the knowledge, skills and experience of the people in communities, and those organisations providing support.

With a wide range of real-life examples and stories from across the network, the event really highlighted the role that people play in the heart of this work. Those who work within our struggling systems do crucial yet invisible work in and for our communities, not only supporting those in need of help, but catching things before they fall.

Our chair, speaker and listeners

Our conference was brilliantly chaired by Brendan Rooney, the newly-retired Executive Director of Healthy N Happy Community Development Trust. We’d like to thank him for guiding the day so well and making sure everything ran to time!

Brendan is a long-time friend of CHEX and you can read his reflections on his decades of work in community development and his hopeful aspirations for the future.

Dr David Walsh of Glasgow University set the context for the day with his powerful presentation on the research about and realities of Scotland's health inequalities. Download the slides from David’s talk (PDF).

Our listeners provided valuable insight and shared our delegates sense of frustration with the current systems as they shared their reflections after the world café session. Ruth Glassborow from Publi c Health Scotland rejoined us, along with new listeners Donna McLeod, a Unit Head at the Scottish Government's Population Health Directorate and Kat Smith, Professor of Public Health Policy at the University of Strathclyde. We’ll have more on their reflections and future actions soon.

Workshops and world café sessions

In the afternoon to follow the morning’s world café and listener reflections, we had some excellent workshops for delegates to really dig into specific topics and gain valuable knowledge from practitioners across Scotland. We’ll have more on these soon too.

Feedback from our delegates

We asked delegates to give us words for our conference word cloud to help us describe the event, and we’re happy to say that ‘inspiring’ was clearly the word of the day. We hope everyone can bring that sense of inspiration into their work as we move further into 2026!