The Care Economy: reimagining health and care

Care is the foundation for life itself, yet its fate in the economy remains fragile. In our hearts it’s honoured as an irreducible good, but in the market it’s routinely sidelined – treated as secondary to productivity and wealth. How did we arrive here, and what can we do to change things?

For those working to improve health and care, we need to examine the deeper structural forces that hinder progress, and recognising what is degrading the wider determinants of health, ​‘the terrain’ that the health and care sector can’t solve alone. 

In this one-hour interactive session Tim Jackson and Jen Morgan will explore the themes of Tim’s latest book ​‘The Care Economy’. They will dive into the origins of the NHS and the cultural norms and foundations that have shaped the complex health and care system. They will consider why care has been excluded from economic thinking, and outline a vision of ​‘prosperity as health’. You’ll have space to reflect on what this means for your work and how improvement could support a new, more human-centred paradigm of care, one that is closer to home. 

This will be a rich, thoughtful conversation about how we might reimagine economy, health, and how we relate to each other in a time of complexity and change

• The origins of the NHS and the cultural DNA and myths that have shaped how we understand health and care today.
• An inspiring vision for a new economic model that is based on ​‘prosperity as health’ and the ​‘economy as care’ 
• An understanding of the systemic barriers to this vision and what this means in particular for the barriers to improvement and transformation of health and care systems of today 

The workshop is open to anyone interested in this subject. It may be of particular interest to you if you are in a role leading large scale improvement and transformation initiatives and working across system and organisational boundaries for care closer to home. 

Over the past four years, Jen has worked as Q’s Head of System Wide Change helping to enable conditions to improve health and care. Jen holds an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice and in her spare time she also leads wellbeing nature retreats for NHS front-line workers.

Tim is Professor Emeritus at the University of Surrey and co-Director CUSP. His work as Economics Commissioner on the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission culminated in the publication of a ground-breaking and provocative bestseller Prosperity without Growth which was a Financial Times book of the year in 2010 and UnHerd’s economics book of the decade in 2019. His other books include Post Growth – Life after Capitalism which won the Eric Zencey prize for ecological economics in 2022 and The Care Economy, published earlier this year by Polity Press. In addition to his academic work, Tim is an award-winning dramatist with numerous radio-writing credits for the BBC.

12.00: Welcome and introduction 

12.05: Discussion on Tim’s book: ​‘The Care Economy’

12:30: Group discussion and reflection time 

12:40: Q&A 

12.55: Summary and close 

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Resources will be added to this webpage after the event.