Country deep dive on the well-being economy: Scotland

Overview

The WHO Regional Office for Europe’s series of deep dives are part of the technical documentation supporting the WHO European Regional High-level Forum on Health in the Well-being Economy (1–2 March 2023). Each publication in the series is developed by combining academic and grey literature with narratives from semi-structured interviews conducted with key stakeholders in government and public health institutions, with the aim to demonstrate concrete country experiences in advancing and implementing well-being economies. This deep dive focuses on Scotland’s experience of building a well-being economy – one of the longest-running national experiments in this field. Partly driven by a commitment to tackling poverty and health inequality, Scotland has developed a distinctive approach combining people-powered and outcomes-based governance, place-based tools and a prevention-focused public health system. While Scotland’s experience is not representative or all-encompassing, countries considering or advancing a shift to a well-being economy will find in its journey both practical inspiration and honest lessons about what it takes to translate well-being ambitions into lasting change.