Refreshed priorities
Building on all that we have learned over the past year, we have refreshed our priorities for the next 12 months. Our three areas of focus are:
1. Working with communities
We want to keep working with local communities to understand what matters most to them. We’ll do this through our Thriving Communities and Building Healthier Communities Programme
2. Supporting people with long-term health conditions
We have long-term health conditions in Lambeth which are disproportionately impacting some of our residents. These could be prevented if diagnosed earlier, or made more manageable with the right support.
3. Joining up more services locally
Our health and care system can be difficult to navigate, which can lead to worse health. We’re looking at how health and care organisations can work better together so we’re better connected and people find it easier to get the support they need.
Bringing more support into the community
We’re committed to working more in the community and giving care and support closer to people’s homes. We’ll do this by building further on our brilliant ‘Thriving Communities’ networks, using the Lambeth Together Health and Wellbeing Bus, and working with social prescribing link workers.
We want to look at how local services can work differently at the same time as having more impact and being more efficient. For example, bringing staff from our hospitals into GP practices, using community halls for pop-up health events, and using new health monitoring technology to help more people stay safe and well at home rather than in hospital.
Reducing inequalities
We’ll continue to work with ‘lived experience’ groups, a space where people who have first-hand experience of a condition come together to share their experiences. By listening to these groups, and gathering local data, we can understand more about the ways in which different people have different experiences of our health and care system. This can result in unfair and avoidable inequalities, where some groups have significantly worse health outcomes.
For example, in Lambeth 17% Black African, 23% Black Caribbean and 11% other Black adults have high blood pressure. This compares to 8% of White British adults. This then leads to unfair differences in rates of stroke, kidney disease, heart disease and dementia. These diseases are all life-changing.
Good health shouldn’t be determined by your income level, where you live or your ethnic background. But these statistics tell a different story. We’re therefore dedicated to developing new services which help overcome these disparities – and to making sure all our resident’s voices are heard and acted upon.