This is the Director’s message published as part of our Annual Report 2024-25
The world is experiencing profound and escalating challenges to health and equity. From wars and state violence to the accelerating climate crisis. From spiralling inequality to the dismantling of our public health systems. Everywhere we look, communities are being pushed into conditions that make living healthy and dignified lives impossible. As health workers, we see these injustices play out in our local communities and feel their effects in our workplaces, where pressures from austerity and chronic underinvestment leave many of us struggling to provide the care people deserve.
At this moment, the role of the health community could not be more vital. Yet it is also clear that campaigning in isolation – focusing on individual issues, or speaking as fragmented voices – is not enough. The problems we face are too vast and too interconnected. If we are serious about health justice, we must act differently.
That is why Medact is shifting how we work as we have developed our new strategy. It reflects an honest recognition that our old ways of working – valuable as they have been – cannot meet the challenges of today. To build a world in which everyone can live healthy, dignified lives, we must root ourselves in community, centre solidarity and grow a movement powerful enough to shift the systems that shape our health.
Medact as a political home
Meeting the complex challenges to health and equity requires more than individual effort – it requires community. At Medact, we are committed to being a political home for the health community: a space where nurses, doctors, students, carers, public health professionals, and others can come together to learn, grow and take action collectively.
This is a place for connection, reflection and development. By sharing knowledge, exchanging perspectives, and supporting one another, members strengthen their capacity to address systemic health inequities with purpose and resilience.
A political home is not just about membership or campaigns; it is about belonging. By bringing together people from across the health workforce, we ensure that our work is informed by real-world experiences and grounded in the communities we serve. Medact is building a space where health workers can grow as advocates, step into leadership, and act together to advance health justice.
Organising for health justice
Embedding organising as the foundation of our approach to health justice is a central priority for Medact. In the past, we have previously campaigned by raising the voice of health workers in isolation – speaking on behalf of communities experiencing injustice. But that approach carries risks. At best, it can fall short of real change. At worst, it can reinforce harmful power dynamics, replicating the very inequities we seek to dismantle.
Our new approach centres on building deep, long-term relationships of solidarity with communities most impacted by injustice. This means organising with communities rather than for them. It means acting not as spokespeople, but as partners. It means recognising that the health community’s role is not to lead from above, but to stand alongside – to bring our expertise, our networks, and our voices into struggles led by those on the sharp end of injustice.
We’ve already seen this approach in action, with Medact members supporting tenants on the Nags Head in London to address long-neglected housing conditions, causing significant health issues, resulting in national media coverage and a £3 million commitment to estate improvements.
By embedding organising into all our work, we can tackle the interconnected crises of our time in a way that is powerful, sustainable, and rooted in justice.
Communicating a vision of health justice
Clearly articulating a compelling vision of health justice is fundamental to how we work. Too often, health is seen only through the narrow lens of disease, diagnosis and treatment. But we cannot deny that health is political. It is shaped by housing, income, work, borders, policing, war and the environment we live in. If we want to build a healthier world, we must help more people see these connections – and show that a better future is possible.
That means amplifying the voices of our members and of communities fighting injustice. It means producing knowledge and analysis that help to make the case for change. It means connecting the dots in ways that build understanding across society: that health is not only about the absence of illness, but about the presence of justice, dignity and care.
A new era for Medact
As Medact’s new Executive Director, I am honoured to lead the organisation into this next chapter. Over the coming five years, our work will focus on strengthening the health justice movement. Growth for us is not measured simply in numbers – it is about building deeper roots, stronger connections, and greater capacity. It is about supporting members to take meaningful action across our priority areas – from housing and energy justice, to migrant access to healthcare, to ending state violence – in ways that are grounded in solidarity and oriented towards lasting change.
The challenges we face are significant, but so too is our collective potential. Across our work, we are already seeing glimpses of this vision in action: health workers organising with tenants to demand safe, warm housing and ending fuel poverty; working side by side in communities to abolish borders and violence in healthcare; resisting militarism in healthcare and campaigning for the liberation of Palestine.
This is just the beginning.
