Agenda item

Matthew Cole, LBBD Director of Public Health, presented his draft Annual Report for 2022/23, which was intended to inform local people about the health of their community as well as providing necessary information for decision-makers in local health services and authorities on health gaps and priorities that needed addressing.

The Annual Report covered the legacy period of Covid-19 and highlighted its lasting impacts in areas such as life expectancy and healthy life expectancy determinants for Barking and Dagenham residents.  The Borough had been disproportionately hit by the consequent economic difficulties and continued to struggle post-Covid due to significantly higher demand for health and social care services.  All of those factors meant that health bodies and the Council faced many challenges which would inevitably affect performance levels and mean that very difficult decisions would need to be taken going forward.

Mr Cole referred to the connections between his report and other high-level documents such as the Borough Manifesto, the Council’s Corporate Plan and the ICS Joint Local Forward Plan discussed earlier in the meeting.  It was also acknowledged that the report would feed into the 2024 Joint Strategic Needs Assessment, which would be presented to the CiC later in the year. 

Key messages within the Annual Report included:

·  The need to exploit the opportunities within the Place-based Partnership and locality working to improve healthy life expectancy;

·  The need to focus on increasing healthy life expectancy and addressing those contributing factors which, in the short term, impacted on overall health, the ability to live independently in later life, and on the increasing demand on the local health and care system;

·  What needed to be done to address the key contributing factors to health life expectancy for both men and women, i.e. addressing long term conditions, key behavioural risk factors and the wider determinants of health;

·  Greater focus on actions that can affect short term change for adults but also those that span across the life course, as today’s children would be tomorrow’s adults and issues experienced in childhood often shaped the trajectory of an individual’s health through to older age;

·  Breaking down barriers that were causing health inequalities, especially amongst those groups who were considered to be ‘hard to reach’;

·  An alignment of strategic plans and delivery plans, investment in programmes delivering the priorities and a reprioritisation of spending of the Public Health Grant;

·  The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on mental health and the important role of the place-based approach for early intervention to improve mental health and wellbeing;

·  An emphasised on a ‘health in all policies’ approach to understand the role of health inequalities in driving community priorities, such as employment opportunities for residents; and

·  The need to drive forward the vaccinations and immunisations programmes to reduce communicable diseases, especially amongst children and babies. On that point, the Chair asked those present to do all they could to promote the MMR jab across all age groups and it was suggested that bus stop advertising would be an effective means of advertising.

Ms Elspeth Paisley welcomed the focus on healthy life expectancy as a wider determinant of health and suggested that understanding how they were linked and having short and longer-term targets to aim for would be useful ways to assess progress and ensure accountability.  Other observations made included:

Ø  Recognising the role of communities as an asset in helping to deliver improvements and how it could be developed further;

Ø  The issue of social isolation and ‘loneliness’ and high neurodiversity levels which impacted on healthy life expectancy and mental health, with a focus on keeping people in the community;

Ø  Understanding who and why people are presenting themselves and having better pathways for referral to support the prevention and early intervention aims, with obesity and diabetes cited as examples,

Ø  The excellent social prescribing set up in Barking and Dagenham;

Ø  The impact that consistent health checks would have over the long-term in respect of improving health outcomes;

Ø  The disparity between central funding received within Barking and Dagenham, which was lower than neighbouring boroughs.

Nathan Singleton also referred to a report recently completed by Healthwatch in relation to Education Health and Care Plans (EHCP) and the expected three-fold increase in cases by 2035, which highlighted the need for early intervention in that area.

Concluding the discussions, Councillor Worby referred to the work being undertaken within the Council with regard to localities and how its various services could work in a more seamless way.  Mr Cole also advised that a peer review on the local public health approach would take place in February 2024, led by the Local Government Authority (LGA).

The Health and Wellbeing Board and ICB Sub-Committee resolved to note the Director of Public Health’s draft Annual Report for 2022/23, as set out at Appendix A to the report.