Agenda item

To receive the Health & Wellbeing Board Strategy Progress Report: March-October 2024.

The Service Delivery Manager in Public Health presented the Health & Wellbeing Strategy Delivery Progress between April and October 2024.

Key areas to highlight were the significant progress that had been made across the wide range of priorities. Reaching communities through outreach activity had been enhanced through established relationships with trusted local leaders and volunteers. This approach, along with the use of data had proved effective in ensuring local resources were targeted to tackle inequalities and delivery of a broad range of high quality support services close to where people live.  Partnership working remained strong, in particular joint working across council teams and interagency working with the community and voluntary sector.

Several programmes have benefitted from short term project funded providing opportunities to test out new innovative approaches and to collaborate with new partners. The continued budget pressures and short term funding across all partners remained one of the largest challenges across programmes. Looking forward it was important to maximise opportunities for prevention, place based working and integration with our system wide health partners. This approach has huge potential to deliver improved outcomes for local residents.

Key points to note were the significant amount of delivery that had taken place over the last few months including reaching out to communities with outreach activities and building trust with volunteers.  Intelligence led data for an informed approach, tackling inequalities, strong partnership working, joint working with Council teams, agencies and the voluntary sector, new and innovative approaches and new partners.  There would remain large challenges across the programmes but they would look to maximise prevention and delivery improved outcomes for local residents.

The community blood pressure project was one of a number of listed key deliverables in the HWB Strategy and detected high blood pressure at an early stage to help prevent heart attacks and strokes.  It had the potential to reach lots of people and was a short-term funded programme with funding ending in March 2025.  The work had been commissioned by the ICB, working across the agencies, with strong links to the voluntary sector in order to mobilise through scale.  The scheme had undertaken 2,000 blood pressure checks and had demonstrated a 25% increase in engagement from the black and ethnic minority residents.  It was intended to scale up the model and deliver a further 2,500 checks and introduce the national pilot within the workplace.  This would ensure that availability was at the right place at the right time spreading the work through the community.

During the debate, it was welcomed that the preventative action was seeing results and that prevention was key for communities within the Borough.  Funding streams would be utilised in order to prevent CVD, and this alongside work around priorities for diabetes and weight control would be continued.  It was asked if the project could be widened to prostate checks as this was an essential measurement of health in men.  Communication was key and it was asked if that literature on these preventative schemes could be produced in alternative languages to directly target these groups.  It was also highlighted of the benefits of wrap around services to tackle health inequalities and ensure that there was the support to tackle wellbeing as a whole. 

The delivery of progress made against the HWB Strategy priorities since the last update report in March 2024 was noted.