Consultation on health and wellbeing in County Durham

Background

As the county's Health and Wellbeing Board, we must work with health services, public health and social care services to improve your health and wellbeing. We must also create a Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy (JHWS) to say how we will do this.

A year ago, we consulted on the Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2020-2025 as a one year interim strategy while we waited for the new County Durham Vision 2035 to be developed and agreed.

Over 95% of you told us that you were supportive of our strategic priorities of Starting Well, Living Well and Ageing Well during the last consultation.

The Strategy

The ongoing pandemic has impacted more on certain people across the County, particularly those who already experience health inequalities. Over the last year, the actions in the strategy have supported our approach in how we respond and deliver health and social care services in these unprecedented times, so they will remain the same. 

However, we have made some changes to our objectives under these strategic priorities.

Proposed strategic objectives

We have chosen the following six objectives as we believe they will have a greatest impact on people's health and will help to achieve our goals for improving the health of our communities by 2025. We recognise these are challenging but by working together across our partnerships and local communities we can make a difference. 

• Improve healthy life expectancy and reduce the gap within County Durham and between County Durham and England.
• We will have a smoke free environment with over 95% of our residents not smoking and an ambition that pregnant women and mothers will not smoke.
• Decrease overall levels of unemployment and specifically close the employment gap between the general population and those living with a long term physical or mental health condition, or with a learning disability.
• Over 90% of our children aged 4-5 years, and 79% of children aged 10-11 years are of a healthy weight.
• Improved mental health and wellbeing evidenced by increased self-reported wellbeing scores and reduced suicide rates.
• Increase the number of organisations involved in Better Health at Work Award.

We are now seeking your views on these changes and to find out if you feel there are any gaps.

• Draft Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy for 2021-2025 (PDF, 575.1kb)
• Draft Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy for 2021-2025 - easy read version (PDF, 225.4kb)

Have your say

Next steps

The final version of the strategy will be taken to the Health and Wellbeing Board on 18 March 2021 and it will then go to our Cabinet for final approval.