Agenda item

The DPH delivered a presentation on the Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2023-28 refresh framework for delivery and consultation. This detailed:

• The statutory duty of the Council to produce a Health and Wellbeing Strategy, which sat with the Council’s Health and Wellbeing Board. It set out the health and wellbeing needs of residents and mapped out what was needed to be undertaken over the next three to five years to improve health outcomes;
• The context, intended vision and key principles behind the Strategy;
• How the Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy interlinked with other strategies and delivery plans;
• The consultation dates for the Strategy, which was open for comment between 30 March and 30 April 2023; and
• How it was intended for the Strategy to be monitored in terms of progress.

The Committee requested an informal consultation session between itself, the Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care and Health Integration and Public Health, for Members to provide wider Committee feedback on the Strategy.

In response to questions from Members, the DPH stated that:

• The consultation was available online, for residents and interested partners to provide comment. The consultation was also being complimented with various focus groups, working with specific partners that the Council had networks with. The Council was also engaging with professionals, partners and the wider community through social media, digital media through the website and the Council’s newsletter.
• Consultation had also recently being undertaken around the Council’s Best Chance in Life Strategy for prenatal conception care through to age 25; the outcomes of which were also being factored into the Health and Wellbeing Strategy.
• The Council was engaging with typically “harder-to-reach” patient groups, such as the homeless, asylum seekers and emerging communities, such as the growing Romanian community, through its existing networks, partners and Healthwatch.
• One of the most difficult aspects of delivering medical and mental health care was communication. There were various barriers to being able to communicate with people, such as where an individual had a learning disability or a language issue, or due to technical medical language. When new communities came to the Borough, there was also often a need to explain how they could access primary care, registering with a GP and what an individual was entitled to through the health system.
• The Council was investing more in interpretation services, as it had found that leaflets were often ineffective in assisting those who were not fluent in English.

The Integrated Care Director at NELFT stated that NELFT had a contract with the Language Shop, which provided interpretation services across a range of London boroughs and health providers, for both sign and spoken languages, in telephone and in-person formats. Whilst it recognised that many families would translate for other family members, it did not rely on this as a source of translation, as it acknowledged that family members could mistranslate information, as well as due to challenges in the Borough around issues such as domestic violence and coercion. If an individual had an access need, they were able to highlight this prior to their appointment, so that NELFT was able to provide interpretation services.

The DPH also stated that in many languages, there was often not a direct translation for some medical diagnoses or conditions, which could prove difficult in explaining certain terms to individuals; the Council was investing in learning and work around this through its Health Inequalities project work, investing in community advocates and by co-locating community hubs within faith community spaces.

In response to further questions from Members, the DPH stated that the Council was engaging well with well-established partners from the LGBTQ+ community and with children and young people. The Borough was also continuously assessing the needs of its children and young people through its annual school health survey, in conjunction with the University of Bristol.

A Member stated that the needs of the Lithuanian community needed to be better considered, with many not understanding where to go when they had speech and language problems. The Member had had to signpost these individuals to services in Newham, as they were able to liaise with services in their native language there. The DPH stated that this would be factored into the consultation, ensuring that further work would target this group to improve their access to services.