Issue - meetings

Guy Kilminster, Head of Health and Wellbeing, will brief the committee on the following matters:

      The Health and Wellbeing Service,

      The Health Inequalities Strategy, and

      The transfer of the public health function to the Council.

Guy Kilminster, Head of Health and Wellbeing, briefed the committee on the following matters:

      The Health and Wellbeing Service – this was a service providing a range of leisure and cultural services including libraries, green spaces, Public Rights of Way and leisure services;  however, a corporate restructure was underway with the results expected later in the year; Portfolio Holder responsibilities had also been reviewed with operational aspects of leisure and culture in the Environment Portfolio Holder’s remit, libraries were in the Performance and Capacity Portfolio and the leisure and cultural strategy under the remit of the Health and Wellbeing Portfolio;

      The Health Inequalities Strategy and transfer of public health to the Local Authority – a Transition Board had been developed that included the Chief Executive; Director of Adults, Community, Health and Wellbeing; Director of Children’s Services and Director of Public Health.  In 2013 the Borough would need to have a Health Inequalities Strategy in place and work towards this had begun through the development, over the next few months, of a Health Inequalities framework to identify the main areas of health inequality.   There was a large amount of data which would be needed at Local Area Partnership level and the work of the Transition Board would include looking at existing data to assess its usefulness and identify any gaps in data. 

During the discussion on the item, the following points were made:

      it was essential to have some analysis of data as well as the figures;

      there were wide variations within a LAP area;

      each LAP could play an important role as LAP members knew their area well and such local knowledge could help towards developing local solutions.

RESOLVED: that the update be noted and a further report be brought to the meeting in September.