People Behind the Partnership – Dr Salma Reehanna

Published: 22 June 2026

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Dr Salma Reehanna has spent much of her career in clinical leadership roles and brings that experience into her work as a Neighbourhood Clinical Lead. Currently a GP Partner within Health and Beyond, she primarily works at Bilston Urban Village Medical Centre, serving communities across the South neighbourhood in Wolverhampton.

Having worked in the area for many years, she has built strong relationships with local practices and partners, giving her a deep understanding of both the system and the community it serves. Bilston itself is recognised as one of the most deprived areas nationally, and she is passionate about using this role to help make a meaningful difference locally.

What attracted her to neighbourhood working is the opportunity to focus on practical change. She sees it as a chance to move away from layers of governance and red tape and instead build on existing relationships to support more joined-up, community-focused ways of working. For her, it’s about keeping things grounded – working with a smaller group of people who already serve the same communities and finding better ways to support them together.

She is particularly interested in how services can work more closely across health, housing, social care and the voluntary sector, while being realistic about the pressures each faces. A key focus is reducing duplication, improving understanding between organisations, and creating clearer, more joined-up pathways for patients.

In the early stages, her priority is to focus on a small number of shared challenges, particularly around children and young people, and test how neighbourhood working can make a difference in a practical, scalable way. This includes exploring how partners can work together more effectively to support issues like respiratory health, where wider factors such as housing play a significant role.

For her, success over the next few years would mean better understanding across the system, less duplication, and at least one example of a genuinely joined-up approach that improves outcomes for local people – something that could then be built on more widely.

Above all, she sees neighbourhood working as an opportunity to get back to basics: working closely with partners, focusing on what really matters, and making changes that people can actually feel in their day-to-day lives.