​Healthcare in Scotland faces sustainability and human rights challenges: rising chronic disease burden, record pharmaceutical consumption, and persistently high rates of poor mental health among the medical students who will staff the system in future.

 

Humanising Healthcare exists to address these pressures at their root, through medical education reform and community-based health creation.

 

Founded in 2021 as a student-led initiative at the University of Glasgow, Humanising Healthcare has since grown into a government-backed organisation with work across Scotland. Our flagship program, the Conversation Cafe, is the world's first embedding of structured dialogue between medical students and people in recovery of its kind within a national medical curriculum — now a curriculum feature at four of Scotland's five medical schools, delivering 32–36 sessions a year for up to 900 students. The Conversation Cafe has proven to build empathy, challenge stigma, and connect future clinicians to the social determinants of health early in their training. Find out more about the Conversation Cafe here

 

The Case for Change

 

Three interconnected problems underpin our work:

 

• Rising multimorbidity and healthcare inequality:   Scotland has the widest health inequality gap of any UK nation: life expectancy is 13.2 years lower for men and 10.5 years lower for women in the most deprived areas, with an even wider healthy-life-expectancy gap (20.8 for men and 23.4 years for women).

• Misaligned medical curriculum: Despite cultural determinants of health, such as diet, physical activity and social situation - being the primary drivers of the diseases the NHS faces, teaching around these themes makes up <1% of the medical curriculum. This misalignment between medical education and the modern health climate limits the effectiveness of healthcare tools available to practitioners. If you do not address the roots, the weeds will keep growing. 

• Persistently poor student wellbeing: Medical students report persistently high rates of anxiety, depression and burnout during training, undermining both individual wellbeing and long-term workforce resilience. There is a need for more creative and inspiring medical education, aligned with the health needs of the present day to equip students to be effective and sustainable healthworkers now and for the future. 

 

These are not isolated issues. They share common roots in how healthcare is taught, delivered and experienced — and addressing them requires intervention at the level of medical education and community health infrastructure, not only clinical practice.

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Our Approach

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Humanising Healthcare applies what we term a 'Root Cause Care' model: an approach to health and education that prioritises prevention, lifestyle intervention and patient empowerment alongside conventional clinical care. 

 

This model informs both our curriculum-based programmes and our community health creation work.

 

We are now extending this approach through Phase 3 of our development: expanding Conversation Café into pharmacy and nursing education, and establishing a community health creation space in Mount Florida, Glasgow, on currently disused land adjacent to the train station, developed in partnership with Network Rail.

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Our Objectives

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Across our programmes, we aim to:

 

• Build compassion and clinical reasoning that accounts for the whole person, not just the surface manifestation of disease process

• Strengthen links between healthcare training and local communities, including social prescribing practice

• Lead on-the-ground health creation via the adaptive re-use of of derelict amenity land in communities as sites for health education and community well-being activities

• Offer health creation content via our education platform to trainee healthcare professionals and qualified clinicians

• Address the social and commercial determinants of health within medical education

• Bring the Root Cause Care model into clinical dialogue

 

Humanising Healthcare is currently completing registration as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO) with OSCR, reflecting our transition to a long-term, sustainably governed organisation capable of delivering at scale.

 

Further detail on our programmes, governance and current initiatives is available on request.