Agenda item

[To consider the Public Health Annual Report 2018-19]. 

The Director for Public Health presented the Public Health Annual Report 2018-2019.  He had a statutory duty to deliver an Annual report.  He stressed it was important to get the basics right in life to ensure people remained in good health this included good housing and living in a good community.  The Annual report included a section at the back of the report on individual ward profiles.  He was particularly pleased with the work Public Health had completed in partnership with health partners on health checks.  Organisation had been the key to success in both the increased uptake of health checks and flu vaccinations. 

A Member of the Panel commented that she felt the ultimate strapline from the report was that if you wanted to live longer it was important not to be poor.  They stressed the importance of living in good quality housing and the value of the enforcement work the Council carried out in private sector housing.  They believed the enforcement team had halved in strength in recent years. 

The Panel discussed the ward profiles and the differences in life expectancy. Comments were made about breaking the cycle of deprivation within families.  A Panel Member asked about the amount of alcohol related hospital admissions in Wolverhampton and what action could be taken to bring the level down.  The Director for Public Health responded that alcohol abuse was a key problem for the City to address.  It was important to promote sensible drinking practices and have an effective intervention service.  The Wolverhampton alcohol intervention services were well respected nationally. 

A Panel Member asked about the homeless figures for Wolverhampton.  The Director for Public Health offered to write to her with the formal definitions of rough sleeping and homelessness as they were different.

The Chair remarked that it was most concerning that nearly a third of local children aged 0-15 years old were living in poverty (31.3%).  He asked what definition of poverty Public Health were using in the report and what they were trying to do to change the situation.  The Consultant in Public Health responded that Public Health were using a well-established national indicator for child poverty in their report.  Nationally there was a database of all the families in receipt of child tax credits.  A child was deemed to be living in poverty if they lived in a household in receipt of child tax credits and the household was receiving income support or job seeker supporter, or if they were living in a family receiving child tax credit and were deemed to be in the bottom 60%. Wolverhampton did not compare well to the rest of the country and that was largely down to the deprivation rate in Wolverhampton.  The child poverty figure in Wolverhampton was similar to Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall.  The only way to improve the figure was to increase the employment rate and improve household incomes. Jobs, skills, strong and stable homes and opportunity were key.

The Chair asked what the contributing factors were that meant there were more children in the care of the Council in the City (110.6 per 10,000) than in England (62.0).  He commented that this was a significant difference to the national average and asked how the Wolverhampton figures compared to the rest of the Black Country.  He was particularly keen to know if there were any children at unregistered providers.  The Consultant in Public Health responded that the Wolverhampton figures were in line with those for Walsall, Sandwell and Dudley.  The figure had come down for Wolverhampton but was still high compared to the national figure.  He believed the level of deprivation in Wolverhampton was the key reason why the figure was high in Wolverhampton.  The Director for Public Health commented that he would provide a written response to the Chairman on the matter of unregistered providers.

The Chair asked for some information on the work Public Health were doing with health partners to combat loneliness including the use of any technological solutions.  The Consultant in Public Health responded that relationships and systems was the key point to address when addressing loneliness.  In an aging population you would see increasingly elderly women living on their own because of their higher average life expectancy to men.  Men were increasingly marrying at a later age and therefore some were living on their own at an early stage in adulthood.  Pregnant women also sometimes fell into social isolation after giving birth.  Social isolation was therefore a life course issue.  The Public Health Team were supporting the NHS in some of the work they were undertaking in social prescribing.  The NHS were putting significant financial resources into social prescribing.  Public Health’s role he saw as bridging systems together.  They were looking to redesign the Wolverhampton Information Network which was a key directory of local opportunities at a place based level. 

The Director for Adult Services commented that they were undertaking significant work from a social care perspective in combatting social isolation.  They had introduced new ways of working for social workers over the last 18 months to free up time from bureaucratic process, so they could spend more time in communities working to support people in social isolation.  The Healthwatch Manager commented that they had just completed a two-year project on loneliness and social isolation and expressed a desire to feed the findings of this work into Public Health.