Gateshead Health and Wellbeing Strategy

We know our health and care services are changing, and demand is increasing as our population gets older and technology advances. We must ensure that our services support everyone's needs. We will involve local communities and the voluntary and community sector in the planning of services to reflect local priorities and needs. We will integrate our health and care services whilst ensuring they are placed based and bespoke to the needs of individuals.

Our health and care system will measure success in terms of improved wellbeing, independence and social connections. We will try to move existing resources away from expensive acute care provision, so we can reinvest in prevention and early intervention measures. We will keep people who need complex support, living at, or near, home, to have the support of their family and community.

The action we will take

We will:

• prioritise funding for the prevention of ill-health and high cost intervention at all levels
• embed the local VCSE organisations in ill health prevention, planning and delivery
• integrate how we plan, make decisions and provide health, social care and housing, to respond to needs where people live
• prevent homelessness and better understand its root causes and how we address them
• ensure that no-one is living in unhealthy or unsafe accommodation
• reduce the scale and impact of substance misuse (alcohol, tobacco and drugs)
• adopt a system-wide Make Every Contact Count approach
• monitor the health of people in Gateshead together with our partners through shared long-term measures
• design how we work, and what we do, together across Gateshead, to recognise and facilitate effective social prescribing approaches

We will deliver this through:

• Gateshead Health and Care System Board
• integrated planning, performance and commissioning plan
• public service reform
• Gateshead Housing Company
• Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy
• local VCSE organisations and Connected Voice
• Gateshead Smoke Free, Healthy Weight and Substance Misuse Alliances
• Procurement Strategy

We know we will have made a difference when:

• all preventable ill health in Gateshead is reduced, to end the gap in inequalities within the borough
• no one will be homeless, or living in accommodation that does not provide a safe and healthy environment
• all residents will be able to access flexible health and care support, when and where they need it