Agenda item

To receive a report from the Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care and Public Health and the Director of Public Health on the development of a revised approach to public health commissioning.

Mr M Gilbert, Commissioning and Performance Manager, was in attendance for this item.

1.            Dr Khan introduced the report and, with Mr Gilbert, responded to comments and questions from Members, as follows:-

a)    to help address the large discrepancy in health outcomes across the county, local County Council Members could become more involved in the delivery of health campaigns.  They would need to develop a way of being kept up to date about events.  Dr Khan agreed that this was a good idea and advised Members that there was still scope to build into the model some way of engaging them. She undertook to consider how this could be achieved;

b)    there would always be some people who did not wish to have help with addressing their unhealthy habits and were happy with their lifestyle. Following ‘Dry January’ could be ‘Fatless February’!  Dr Khan confirmed that the model of health improvement was based on influencing behavioural change.  Many people were unaware that their habits were harmful to their health. Behaviours also tended to ‘cluster’, for example, smokers tended also to drink, and one behaviour may depend on the other, making either difficult to give up in isolation. Harmful habits also tended to ‘snowball’ or increase and become entrenched. To be effective, campaigns should relate to the communities they were trying to influence, and reach them via the most appropriate means for the intended audience, eg by using social media;

c)    in response to a question about the sample used by Behavioural Architects, and whether or not this sample was large enough to be representative, Mr Gilbert explained that, although the number of people sampled by Behavioural Architects, a specialist behavioural science agency, was small, it was selected to be as representative of the population as possible, and the research undertaken with the sample was detailed;

d)    a view was expressed that Kent could look at and learn from public engagement campaigns run by other local authorities, eg the ‘Born in Bradford’ scheme;

e)    in response to a question about monitoring people’s engagement with the daily digests of ‘healthy living’ guidance produced by district councils, Dr Khan explained that patient and stakeholder engagement were studied when preparing contracts specifications, to check that the specifications were right;

f)     in response to a concern about reaching sectors of the public which were traditionally hard to reach and were often most likely to use unhealthy behaviours as a ‘crutch’, Dr Khan agreed that people in the lower socio-economic groups tended to view health messages as the least important concern they had, and consequently were traditionally hard to incentivise; and

g)    a group which had not historically been a concern but was known to drink and smoke more than a few years ago was middle-class women, many of whom were struggling to balance career and children as well as caring for elderly parents.  Dr Khan added that statistical evidence supported this concern, as well as the fact that rates of breast cancer and ovarian cancer in this group were rising.

2.    RESOLVED that:-

a)            the progress of the transformation work and the findings of the customer insight work and public consultation be noted, and Members’ comments, above, be taken into account; and

b)            the direction of travel, and the work to integrate adult health improvement services, be endorsed.