Agenda item

This report presents the Brent Health and Wellbeing Board an update on the Brent Health Matters programme including additional areas of focus.

Tom Shakespeare (Director of Health and Social Care Integration, Brent Council) introduced the update on the Brent Health Matters Programme, which he explained was the Brent system response to the challenges of health inequalities within the Borough. It had been 9 months in delivery and development, and 6 months since additional funding had been received from central government for the programme. He highlighted the following key points in relation to the update:

· The programme had 5 main strategic aims; to reduce the impact of Covid-19; to increase the uptake of vaccinations and health screenings; to reduce variation in life expectancy for those with long term conditions; to increase community awareness of existing support and services within the community and; to increase engagement with GPs and the number of people with a registered GP. This would be done through listening to communities and working with them to address the main aims.

· The workstreams of the clinical service had focused on improving health assessments and the uptake of particular services such as flu vaccinations, health checks and blood checks. There was a dedicated phone line for Brent residents to call for help and advice, staffed 5 days a week by clinicians within the clinical team. The team had also focused on Covid-19 over the last few months, supporting some of the vaccination pop-ups alongside the community team, community champions and volunteers.

· The community element of the service now had 27 Health and Wellbeing

Community Champions and 7 Community Co-ordinators across the 5 Brent

Connects areas. Page 57 of the agenda pack gave an overview of the £250k grants programme organisations had bid to and the types of impact those grants would deliver.

· The programme had contracted with a consortium of volunteer organisations for the recruitment of a number of health educators across the Borough working as a voice and bringing people towards health services, improving the awareness of health and clinical conditions.

· Communications work had been done around vaccination, including with younger people and there had been positive coverage in the guardian about the work of the Brent Health Matters programme.

· The next phase of the programme was to bring together the work by primary care colleagues on the development of a diabetes model alongside community engagement and health educators to promote those services and tackle those challenges.

· Community co-ordinators were working across the patch with housing associations such as Catalyst, using the Unity Centre to help promote the programme.

The Chair thanked Tom Shakespeare for the update and invited members to comment, with the following issues raised:

·         Dr M C Patel (NWL CCG) advised that, working with Imperial College London, North West London would be looking for the first time to put blood pressure results, glucose levels, BMI, age and ethnicity together to give individual profiles to practices about their patients. The piece of work would be presented in a few days’ time to NWL and could be presented in 3-4 months’ time at the Health and Wellbeing Board. He advised that while there were national targets for blood pressure, Brent were challenging the prevailing views based on the evidence it had, highlighting that if the traditional targets were stuck to the improvement to patients’ was not as great. For example, within 34 practices in Brent, 1093 patients had blood pressure above 140 over 90 (the national threshold) and were diabetic. If that threshold changed to 130 over 80, there were 5,000 patients with that blood pressure, meaning that, by sticking to traditional targets, they missed 4,000 patients that could be affected by blood pressure over the coming years. A 5mm reduction in blood pressure could decrease the risk of heart attack by 25-28% which Dr Patel highlighted was a significant figure. He explained those were the sorts of interventions Brent wanted to make, challenging established thinking and making a material difference to patients through this programme, alongside research, for tangible outcomes.

·         In relation to the work focused on diabetes, the Board queried what support or integrated partnership working was happening with community services. Janet

Lewis (CLCH) advised that, for diabetes work, the transformation on that piece of work would start post 1 August 2021 and agreed there was some work to do as a community provider which they were committed to. Community services were currently looking to recruit to vacancies in the team. Janet Lewis had met with the Brent Health Matters Programme Director the previous week about the project and were much clearer what the programme was and were happy to be a part of it as a community provider.

RESOLVED: To note the Brent Health Matters Update.