Cumberland Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2023 to 2028

Why is this important?

Health protection focuses particularly on how the public is protected from infectious diseases, cancer and environmental hazards such as chemicals, radiation and extreme weather.

Health protection has a significant multi-agency dimension. Screening and immunisations for children and adults are commissioned by Integrated Care Boards and delivered by local health services. Communicable disease control involves significant joint efforts by the Council’s public health and environmental health teams and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), among many others. Resilience and emergency preparedness work is coordinated through the multi-agency Local Resilience Forum.

The Covid-19 Pandemic brought the vital importance of effective Health Protection Programmes into sharp focus. It also emphasised the importance of effective emergency preparedness, resilience and response, and of whole system co-ordinated responses.  The pandemic also saw the development of new ways of working between agencies and equally importantly between those agencies and their communities.  

The valuable role of voluntary organisations and volunteers needs to be embraced and supported as an essential component to our future approaches to addressing all areas of health and wellbeing. The climate crisis means that we are likely to see increasing incidences of extreme weather events, emphasising again the importance of co-ordinated preparedness and response.

Priority areas

• Increase the uptake of vaccination and screening programmes and work to address inequalities in access and outcomes to reduce admissions to hospital and serious illness 
• Supporting people with Learning Disabilities to access immunisation and screening opportunities 
• Building effective, co-ordinated whole system emergency preparedness and response
• Nurturing strong and resilient communities through emergency planning and broader community development activities

What sort of things are we going to do?

• Undertake targeted vaccination programmes for MMR, Covid and flu
• Deliver occupational vaccination schemes across the health and social care workforce.
• Evaluate breast screening uptake and develop an action plan for improvement
• Ensure robust emergency response plans are in place across organisations
• Co-ordinate joint system training and exercising opportunities for emergency preparedness
• Consider risks to the health system from climate hazards, and possible adaptations 
• Supporting residents, businesses and others to adapt to the impacts of climate change
• Put in place robust services, protocols, and pathways to respond to cases or incidents of infectious disease
• Work with third sector and other partners on community development activity to improve wider community resilience including through Community Resilience Networks, good neighbour schemes and other informal community action

How are we going to measure progress?

• Uptake of all relevant vaccinations across our population, including occupational vaccination rates across the health and social care workforce
• Flu/MMR vaccination coverage in at risk individuals
• Screening rates
• Emergency plans in place and tested regularly