In September 2016 health and care partners formed the West Suffolk Alliance. We have committed to work together to improve the health and care system in west Suffolk for all people whether they be a child, part of a family or a single adult.
Our belief is that by working together in an alliance we can have an impact on wellbeing, care and physical and mental health outcomes for people. Our focus within the alliance is on people and places.
The strategy for our alliance is to move from working as individual organisations towards being a fully integrated single system, with a shared vision, clear local priorities, able to both provide an improved service for people in west Suffolk and also to tackle the sustainability issues faced by the system together.
The Localities
There are six localities across West Suffolk (Bury Town, Bury Rural, Haverhill, Mildenhall and Brandon, Newmarket and Sudbury), each of which has it’s own characteristics and health and wellbeing priorities, informed by the Place Based Needs Assessment for that locality.
The locality includes the INT with a number of health and care providers, GP surgeries etc. We have set up locality meetings as a way of getting organisations and people involved in health and wellbeing together to plan and co-ordinate activity and to share information. Some examples of who is in the locality include the police, children’s services, VCS partners, community groups and local residents.
Place Based Needs Assessments (PBNAs)
In Suffolk, our partners at Public Health Suffolk have produced PBNAs for Integrated Neighbourhood Team (INT) areas. INT members include local councils (Suffolk district and borough councils as well as services from Suffolk County Council) and the NHS (including GPs, community healthcare, the Clinical Commissioning Groups). PBNAs give INT members evidence about the communities they serve, and the needs of those communities. This informs our decision-making and service-planning.
The PBNAs have been produced for each of our localities below:
Please note: These are the PBNA executive summaries. The full reports can be downloaded HERE
The PBNAs will be distilled down by each locality into their own main priorities (which will show where the locality has a particular poor/good performance) and actions set against each. These actions will form part of the locality delivery plan and the locality group will monitor progress.
It is intended to take the main themes and baseline measures from each PBNA and use those to populate and develop a radar chart for each locality that can them be easily used to monitor progress against each locality priority.
Locality Public Engagement Events
The Alliance communication leads will be using the information from the PBNAs to establish a rolling programme of public and stakeholder events in each locality, led by Locality Leads.
The objectives for each event will be to share knowledge gathered in the PBNAs, help set local priorities, working with communities to get their ideas on how to improve health and wellbeing in their area, recognising that NHS and public sector organisations are not the only answer to people’s own health and wellbeing. The information from these events will be collated so that we start to gather engagement intelligence to inform wider alliance plans.
Events are being planned for Spring 2020 – you can read the DRAFT Locality Engagement Plan HERE
The plan is currently being co-produced with members of our Community Engagement Group and Locality Leads.
