Essex Joint Health & Wellbeing Strategy 2022-2026 Consultation

Overview

What is the Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy?

Every local area must have a Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy (JHWS) setting out the priorities identified through the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) that local government, the NHS and other partners will deliver together through the Health and Wellbeing Board (HWB). The JHWS is intended to set ‘a small number of key strategic priorities for action’, where there is an opportunity for partners to ‘have a real impact’ through local initiatives and action. The overall aim of the JHWS is that we see an improvement in health and wellbeing outcomes for people of all ages and a reduction in health inequalities by having a focus on supporting poor health prevention and promoting health improvement.

This all-aged strategy articulates a shared vision for health and wellbeing in Essex. It sets out the critical issues as identified in our joint strategic needs assessment, the priorities of member organisations and wider system partners, our key countywide strategic priorities, our agreed outcomes and how we will measure and assess our progress. The JHWS is owned by system partners including the NHS, the District, Borough and City Councils’ Health and Wellbeing Partnership Boards, the Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner, Safeguarding Boards, education, and the voluntary and community sector.

The overall ambition of the HWB is to reduce the gap in life expectancy, increase years of healthy life expectancy and reduce the differences between health outcomes in our population. To reach these long-term ambitions, and as part of the development of this strategy, we have identified five key overarching priority areas:

1. Improving mental health and wellbeing
2. Physical activity and healthy weight
3. Supporting long term independence
4. Alcohol and substance misuse
5. Health inequalities & the wider determinants of Health

This strategy sets out how we want to work collectively as a partnership to deliver against these priorities, the importance of working with our communities, and how the JHWS links with other strategies and policies locally which are ‘owned’ by other partnerships. The HWB acknowledges there is much cross-over to these, and that delivery may be through other existing partnerships. As such, sitting alongside this strategy will be a more detailed delivery plan setting out the key activities and initiatives that will be delivered across the HWB partnership to help achieve our goals and ambitions and where links to other partnerships may be needed. We have started to do this by providing details of the other strategies we have considered but recognise the delivery plan will need to be reviewed and refreshed at intervals throughout the lifetime of this strategy to reflect changes to influencing strategies. Therefore, the plan will sit as a separate document to enable partners to adapt it to respond to changing needs and emerging issues as needed in the future.

Why your views matter

In this consultation we ask whether or not you agree that the five priority areas and proposed outcomes identified in the strategy are the right ones, and if there is anything else you would like to see included.

There will be opportunities to add any comments or suggestions, and all feedback received will be reviewed and used to inform the final version of the Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy.

If you require this consultation in an alternative format, please contact public.health@essex.gov.uk or 0333 0136649.

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