Health Inequalities Strategy

Health Inequalities Strategy: 

Health Inequalities Strategy 2005-10 (word)
Position statement (word)
Health indicators for Ealing (pdf)

Evolving a Healthier Community for All: Ealing's Health Inequalities Strategy has been developed to improve the wider determinants of health, enhance availability of good medical care, and support healthier lifestyle choices with a view to improve health equality.

This five year strategy has been developed through:

Through this process five key priority areas have been identified:

  1. Ensuring council and healthcare services are responsive to various needs of the communities they serve.
  2. Tackling poor standard of housing, and housing related issues, to improve the quality of life for:
    • children
    • vulnerable adults including people with physical disabilities, learning disabilities, and/or mental health needs
    • older people
    • other vulnerable groups - these include those who face discrimination due to race, gender, religion or belief, sexual orientation, carers, refugees and asylum seekers, Travellers and Gipsies
  3. Facilitating the development of co-ordinated programmes across all services to inform service improvement for reducing coronary heart disease, diabetes, cancer, stroke, tuberculosis, sexually transmissible infections and falls.
  4. Promotion of mental health, wellbeing and increasing life chances for all children through:
    • improving home life
    • healthy schools
    • educational achievement
    • rehabilitation of youth offenders
    • increasing opportunities for employment for young people
  5. Improving the quality of life of older people in Ealing through the promotion of healthy living and an active life in later years through the development of a ten year strategic plan focussing on services that sustain and promote people's independence in particular:
    • transport
    • leisure activities 
    • education 
    • employment
    • safety
  

Key recommendations
There is much activity to be celebrated. However, the persistent nature of health inequalities means that we must continue to:

  1.  Strengthen and improve effective partnership working to address the underlying determinants of health, and improve access to appropriate medical care, through structured decision-making processes, improved accountability, development of joint service plans and robust systems in place to measure progress. We aim to achieve this by:
    • maintaining a high level of awareness of health inequalities among senior-level management with regular updates regarding effective actions to tackle health inequalities
    • developing and maintaining a comprehensive picture of local health inequalities between geographical areas and between different groups of people; needs led, culturally appropriate services. This includes systems for data collection and sharing information, research and evaluation, and analysis, dissemination of learning, controlled by agreed protocols where necessary
    • developing improved short-term indicators to deliver long term improvements in health and increases in life expectancy 
    • focusing services so the most disadvantaged and vulnerable groups make most progress: engaging with a wide range of stakeholders, including public, patients, and with 'hard-to-reach groups' who do not normally access services 
    • considering pooled budgets across local partnerships to enable effective delivery. Commissioning should take account of the cost-benefits of interventions 
    • using a systematic approach to developing, using and sharing innovative evidence based interventions or, in their absence, good practice models, to enable frontline workers to respond to community need and to target information and services to different groups in different ways. Learning and processes that lead to effective outcomes should be integrated into mainstream service delivery 
    • using analytical tools such as evaluations, health impact assessments and health equity audits to monitor the impact of new and existing initiatives with a health inequalities dimension. Consideration will need to be given to the current capacity available across partner agencies to undertake this work
  2. Support the continued focus of statutory agencies to secure human rights, equity in employment and service provision on ethnicity, sex, age, and disability.
  3. Adopt a community development approach to improving service delivery by:
    • investing in capacity building to engage with partners at all levels 
    • developing the skills and means to enable stakeholder participation and engagement in service planning and delivery 
    • identifying, supporting and developing the skills and activities of local people to provide opportunities for them to go into local public services and/or deliver community focused health initiatives. This will be supported by workforce development policies to engage local talent (short, medium and long term)
  4.  Enable local input to be fed into national policy-making and local service improvement.



For further information telephone Evelyn Gloyn, health inequalities strategy coordinator, on (020) 8825 8021 or email evelyn.gloyn@ealing.gov.uk