Agenda item

Equity of Public Health Services

Giles Ratcliffe, Public Health, to present

Minutes:

Giles Ratcliffe, Public Health Consultant, reported that, as part of the action plan for Aim 4 of the Health and Wellbeing Strategy, it had been agreed that Public Health would undertake an Equity Audit of its commissioned services.  This would review the equity of access for people from some of the most deprived areas of Rotherham.

 

Accordingly, the commissioned Public Health Services in Rotherham were formally contacted to complete an audit of metrics agreed in advance with the service lead commissioning officer.  Data was received and analysed from eleven services; nine services were unable to provide data and three services included in the audit had since been decommissioned and their results omitted from the report.

 

The data requested and received was from three of the most deprived areas of Rotherham (Eastwood, Canklow and the Town Centre and Ferham and Masbrough).  The data was analysed against available population data for Rotherham to find out whether service accessibility was/equitable’, ‘equal’ or ‘unequal’.  To improve health in the three deprived areas i.e. equitable access, the audit would need to show by statistics that there were significantly more clients from those areas. 

 

Nine of the services were at the minimum expected level of equality of access in terms of service delivery, with six at a sufficiently higher level that was potentially improving the health of three of the most deprived areas of Rotherham.

 

Two services were failing to deliver equality of access to three of the most deprived areas of Rotherham.  These services were likely to be contributing to increasing health inequalities between the three areas and Rotherham as a whole.  The services had been commissioned by Public Health to reduce inequalities, although the audit had shown that this was not the case.  This could also be the case across other services in Rotherham.

 

The resulting key actions were:-

 

-                   Public Health to use the findings to inform future commissioning, contracting and performance monitoring.  Public Health to pick up the results with the services to ensure they were equitable going forward;

 

-                   Other organisations to undertake similar audits of services especially services that had the potential to reduce or add to inequalities;

 

-                   Commissioning and contracting smarter to ensure organisations/services put in place commissioning and contracting systems to ensure future services were not inequitable.

 

Discussion took place on the equity of access to public health services by persons who have a hearing impairment.

 

The Health and Wellbeing Board also requested that an update be provided, at the next meeting, of progress with the preparation of the profiles of the individual Borough Council electoral Wards.

 

Resolved:-  (1) That the equity audit, its findings and the actions taken within Public Health as a result be noted.

 

(2) That other organisations/services consider undertaking similar audits to understand the contribution they were making to reducing/increasing deprivation-based inequalities.

 

(3) That all partners consider their future service delivery, commissioning and performance monitoring to ensure that they were able to determine whether or not a given service was in fact reducing or contributing to health inequalities.

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