Developing resilience to tackle health and social inequalities

Resilience has recently become extremely popular as a means to promote health and well-being for individuals and communities and for health and social care practitioners coping with heavy workloads and stressful environments. Commonly defined as the ability to bounce back while living or working in adverse, challenging or disadvantaged contexts, resilience is seen both as a resource for individuals and communities as well as a way to tackle inequalities. This paper explores these concerns for primary care and community health practitioners. Drawing on a research data set from the South East of England, we show how learning about resilience impacts on practitioners’ work, but as importantly, upon their own resilience. Using practice-based theories to understand these effects, this paper discusses these developing resilient practitioners and how their actions or ‘resilient moves’ might promote change to tackle health and social inequalities