Exciting Progress in Northumberland's Health and Wellbeing.
HEALTH AND WELLBEING
Cllr Susan Dungworth Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care and Chair of Northumberland's Health and Wellbeing Board.
Our aim is to ensure everyone has the opportunity to lead healthy, independent lives for as long as possible and to safeguard our most vulnerable residents.
● We are spending £51.6 million a year on commissioned and in-house services to enable people to live independently; examples include £4.5 million on our short term support service which enables people to recover their
independence after a major health crisis or accident and direct payments totalling £6.3 million enabling 758 people to take full control of their own support arrangements.
● We also work hard with partners to protect public health and promote the health and wellbeing of people in Northumberland. Investment has continued in a range of public health services including sexual health and contraception services, 0-19 years public health services, exercise referral, drug and alcohol services and stop smoking schemes. Northumberland residents can now access free home sampling kits which enable them to get tested for HIV.
● As the Annual Report of the Council’s Director of Public Health says, Northumberland residents are in good health overall - and getting healthier. The 2015 report (published in 2016) identified a number of key achievements over the last 12 months and sets out a new approach to meeting the challenges that lie ahead. The report finds a population with high levels of happiness and low levels of anxiety. Northumberland residents can expect to live on average 63 years in good health (more than 75% of their lives) but this varies across the county and there is work still to be done to narrow the gap where health inequalities exist. It also sets out a new strategy for making Northumberland a healthier place to live, which stresses the importance of involving communities in identifying and building on activities which improve their health and wellbeing. The Better Health at Work programme is growing, with eight new businesses achieving the Bronze standard, with an additional reach of 1,265 employees.
● We have also seen several other marked improvements in public health over recent years, including: an increase in the proportion of adults who do not smoke from 81.9% in 2012 to 83.4% in 2015; a increase in the proportion of pregnant women who do not smoke by the time of delivery from 80.6% in
2012/13 to 85% in 2015/16; and a dramatic decrease in the numbers of teenage pregnancies from 239 in 2007 to 121 in 2014. The Council will continue to work with partners to improve the health and wellbeing of the population of Northumberland.
● We have comprehensively updated our arrangements for adult social care to meet the enhanced expectations of new national legislation (the Care Act). We have developed a coordinated approach to “early intervention”, to ensure
that people get immediate help to recover after an illness or accident, and that people who currently have low-level needs, or who are currently able to meet their needs without our help, can get comprehensive advice and information about support in the community which can help to prevent their needs from becoming more serious. Where people need long-term support from us, we have introduced a new approach to assessing their needs and planning their care and support, aiming to make sure that they are fully involved in the process, and have access to the same information as the professionals working with them.
● We have risen to the challenge of new legal requirements introduced by the Supreme Court for the protection of the human rights of people with cognitive impairments who need 24-hour supervision, and are now legally regarded as being “deprived of their liberty”. We have achieved this despite the cumbersome requirements of the existing Act of Parliament, which was not designed to meet the Supreme Court’s interpretation of human rights law, and despite the Government’s failure to give local authorities funding to cover the ongoing costs.
● In 2015, our adult social care service, with funding from Macmillan Cancer Support, appointed a team of four Macmillan social workers to support people with cancer and a range of life-limiting or long-term conditions. The social workers also provide ongoing support to family and friends. The aim is to improve the quality of life for the patient, their family and friends, by helping people get timely, joined up community support, with tailored health and social care plans which reflect the individual’s own wishes. The team also helps to arrange and coordinate hospital discharges, helping people to spend more time at home or in their preferred place of care.
● In 2016 Macmillan social worker Heather Kent won the Adult Social Worker of the Year category in the prestigious national Social Worker of the Year Awards.
● The Northumberland Carers Guide to hospital services, a collaboration between social care staff and in-patient acute services, is now available as a standard information booklet on hospital wards.
● Our Ageing Well Allies training has been developed to help anyone who works with older people, including volunteers, to become more confident in signposting people to activities, services and groups which might help them reconnect with their communities.
● We are investing £2 million in sporting facilities in Bedlington; with improved facilities at the new Bedlingtonshire Community High School and
developments at Gallagher Park. The park will be modernised with a new pavilion and new facilities, including toilets. The new Bedlingtonshire Community High School will have new facilities and will be open to the public from September 2016. Developments include a new studio for health and fitness classes, a multi-functional 4-court sports hall for activities including badminton, basketball, netball and 5-a-side football.
● The new £21m state-of-the-art Ashington Leisure Centre opened to the public in January 2016. The flagship leisure facility in Ashington is a regional centre of excellence for sport with facilities including indoor cricket nets; a six-lane,
25-metre swimming pool, exercise studios, and a six-court sports hall with extensive floor space and equipment for gymnasts. It is also home to the library which has an extensive range of books and digital resources, a dedicated IT hub with 18 computer terminals for research, free wi-fi, and a bespoke children’s library. The leisure centre has also won a number of awards, including the Tourism and Leisure category of the RICS North East
2016 Awards. The new Ashington Leisure Centre has won a prestigious RIBA North East Award at last week’s 2016 Awards ceremony.
● There is further investment in improving our leisure centres across the county.
State-of-the-art facilities are coming to Cramlington, Blyth, Prudhoe, Berwick and Ponteland, helping to regenerate areas, improve health and wellbeing and placed at the heart of local communities. This includes:
○ £3.1 million in Concordia Leisure Centre to provide state-of-the-art climbing facilities; including the north east’s only Clip 'n Climb climbing wall. The refurbishment includes a refurbished gym, a dedicated spinning studio, a new fitness studio, a revamped café and the relocation of Cramlington Library into the centre. There is also a new ten lane tenpin bowling facility improved party rooms, dry changing with the sauna converted into a new spa. The work was completed in July 2016.
○ The Swan Centre in Berwick is to undergo a £3.5m transformation to modernise the look and feel of the centre and also address a gap in sports and leisure provision for children and young people in
Berwick. A range of new facilities is now under consideration in consultation with local people and centre users and could include 10 pin bowling and a clip n’ climb facility as well as an upgrade for the pool changing village and lighting.
● An exciting refurbishment is now underway to bring a state of the art gym and fitness studio to Prudhoe Waterworld.
● An immediate response service combining social and healthcare staff in
Northumberland is providing multi-disciplinary support to enable people with a sudden illness, medical condition or change in circumstance, who are at risk of hospital admission, to remain at home safely.
● We were identified as working at “silver” level in the Local Government
Association/ADASS standards for person-centred safeguarding. This covers:
○ Information packs for service users and carers explaining person centred outcomes
○ The Josephine project - using a life size, anatomically correct cloth woman to support women with learning disabilities to explore a range of health and sexual health issues with a particular focus on ensuring women with learning disabilities are able to ‘keep themselves safe’.
○ Arrangements for engaging young people in adult safeguarding processes.
● Newbiggin sports and community centre is to become a vibrant new hub for local people and a one-stop shop for many council services. As well as sports and leisure, the centre will become home to library services and a range of other council services, including the Men with Sheds project, and a key facility for local groups to use.
● A £500,000 project funded by the council will see the development of Druridge
Bay Community Centre in Hadston. Proposed developments include a
2-storey extension of the community centre to provide a fitness suite on the ground floor and a new space and ring upstairs for the boxing club. The new gym will be equipped with the latest state-of-the-art fitness equipment and an instructor will be employed to provide advice and guidance on health and fitness training programmes. Phase two will the former school site and will feature fitness and play facilities.
● Morpeth Road Primary, in Blyth is creating a £45,000 BMX track for the following an investment by Active Northumberland and the Council.
● We are continuing to protect our libraries and co-locating them with other services where possible. With an annual running cost of £3.9 million our libraries attract over one million users and all our libraries now provide Wi-Fi access.
● Every year the Summer Reading Challenge encourages children to read six or more books of their choice during the holidays, with incentives and rewards up for grabs, plus a certificate and medal for every child who completes the challenge.
Cllr Scott Dickinson Vice Chair of Northumberland's Health and Wellbeing Board out meeting frontline NHS staff and experiencing frontline services for the day.
● A Risk and Independence Team has been launched to offer personalised support for adults with complex support needs with a focus on finding more personalised, community-based solutions.
● Across the county one stop shops are being created to protect frontline services and to keep services local whilst making it easier for residents to access council services under one roof. To date Ashington library has moved into the leisure centre, the library and customer information centre in Cramlington have moved into the refurbished Concordia Leisure Centre and Ponteland library will be moving into the leisure centre later in 2016. At Hexham the council and Active Northumberland are working with Queen’s
Hall Arts to develop a cultural hub for the town which will include an integrated
tourist information and library services, alongside arts provision. Library and customer services in Morpeth have a new temporary home in the recently refurbished Royal Sovereign House in Manchester Street, providing a
one-stop shop for customers. In Berwick the library, registration, tourism and customer services are now housed in the newly refurbished Walkergate building in Berwick, providing a one-stop shop for customers, along with the adult learning service.
● Working with Northumbria Healthcare NHS Trust we have been chosen to take a national lead on transforming care for patients. Building on our already successful work to integrate health and social care in one of the most rural counties in England, the Vanguard project will deliver an integrated primary and acute care system for the county, leading the way nationally. It will further enhance the provision of local services, empowering local communities to live longer and healthier lives at home, with an increased focus on prevention.
● We introduced ‘Hospital to Home’ at Wansbeck and Hexham Hospitals, offering a two hour response to help people stay in the community rather than going to hospital. We really care, protect and develop our young people. Our fostering service and all our children’s homes are judged by Ofsted as being good or outstanding. A social media campaign identified over 300 people who were interested in fostering or adopting.
● A combined Northumberland Carers’ Guide and Wellbeing Check has been developed for use by all health and social care practitioners to help carers think about their needs and how to meet them.
● We’ve invested £1.5 million building three new children’s homes and improving our existing Kyloe House facility.
● Our performance in placing children who are five and over is almost twice that of the national average and the number of children in care in the county continues to be low.
● We have delivered over 83,000 concessionary travel passes, providing 2.5 million free public transport journeys to older people and other eligible residents.
● An innovative Northumberland project, the Haltwhistle Integrated Care Facility, which integrates health, housing and social care, was named Inspirational Project of the Year at the Chartered Institute of Housing’s Celebrating the Region Awards, in 2015.
● The council’s adoption service and children’s safeguarding board were praised by government inspectors. Following an intensive four-week inspection, Ofsted have rated as “good” the council’s performance around adoption, as well as the effectiveness of the Local Safeguarding Children Board, which oversees some of the most vulnerable young people in the community.
● Northumberland County Council’s Youth Offending Service (YOS) has been praised in a recent inspection by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP). The report, which was published on 6th July, praised the service and described work being carried out with children and young people as exceptional.
● In January 2016, fire services in Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, Durham and Darlington and Cleveland joined forces with NEAS to respond to patients with emergency life threatening symptoms. During the six month Emergency Medical Response trial, fire crews have attended a total of 2,904 patients across the patch as a result of 999 calls, of which 136 were in Northumberland, 395 were in Tyne and Wear, 1,811 were in Durham and Darlington and 562 were in Cleveland. The trial has been so successful it will continue up to February 2017.
● In February 2016 NCC helped support the publications of a ‘Happiness Issue’ magazine to help Northumberland residents aged 50-plus to beat the blues. The new edition of the ‘Golden Guide’, a free magazine for the over-50s, features a special 16-page supplement on happiness, taking a light-hearted look at the subject, but with a very practical message. The Guide is packed with local information on topics including leisure, health, money and care, and new listings include activities from amateur radio to orienteering, and allotments to orchestras.
● Northumberland held its first ever Ageing Well conference in February 2016;
to celebrate the positive contribution older people make to their community. It featured a range of speakers and workshops, the extra smile awards, a marketplace showcasing information from organisations and charities and
was open to older people and professionals who work with them.
● During a visit to the county in March 2016 the chief executive of Public Health England, Duncan Selbie, described Northumberland County Council’s approach to public health as ‘exceptional’. He visited Northumberland County Council to find out more about the public health work that is going on locally and to share best practice from other areas.
● Northumberland communities are benefitting from a new and improved community transport scheme from April 2016. Northumberland County Council supported the Getabout voluntary car scheme for the last six years – a service that provides door-to-door transport for people with mobility problems or without access to public transport. To ensure the best possible
service for the future, and responding to calls to help more people and expand the service more widely across Northumberland, the council awarded Adapt North East to provide the scheme.
● A new day service for people with dementia was officially opened in March
2016. Essendene Day Service which moved into the previous day centre space connected to Tynedale House, Cowpen, Blyth is open seven days a week. It is a residential and respite service which is better suited to support the dementia day service than the previous site at Foundry House, Bedlington. The building was refurbished to a high standard, with many of the facilities better than the previous site.
● In April 2016 the county council and its partners in health, tourism, and transport launched an ambitious new strategy to increase cycling and walking in Northumberland. The plan aims to embed a new sustainable travel culture in Northumberland by 2025, and encourage 90% of residents to make at least one journey a week on foot or on a bike. Currently only 13% of journeys in Northumberland under 5km are made on foot or on two wheels.
