The Northwest Population Health and Prevention Network 2022 Update

Wednesday, 21 December 2022

It has been another productive year for the Northwest Population Health and Prevention Network in 2022 working with our partners to support and develop the public health contribution and role of the healthcare, social care and voluntary sector workforce (wider public health workforce), as well as supporting professional development of the public health workforce based across a range of sectors and settings in the NW.

Some of the highlights include:

Webinar programme

We successfully delivered a webinar programme - open to all staff across the NW, focused on the NHS LTP and Covid recovery themes. Topics such as Womens Health, Sustainability, Access to Justice, Epigenetics and Creative Health Solutions. These welcomed over 650 colleagues to these webinars from a range of roles across the North West, all the recordings of webinars (and previous years webinars) can be found at https://www.nwpopulationhealth.nhs.uk/our-work/webinars/.

We have worked closely with our colleagues at OHID supported the hosting of additional webinars https://www.nwpopulationhealth.nhs.uk/partnerships/ohid-north-west/

Making Every Contact Count

This year, following local insight, we focused on Learning Difficulties and Autism - Through conversations both locally and nationally, it has been questioned how appropriate the materials and approaches used in the MECC e-learning and the face-to-face training are for learning disabilities teams to apply, and how accessible the MECC materials are to those communities with diagnosed learning disabilities and/or autism. As a result, a small working group with colleagues from Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS, and Health Education England was formed to develop a recommendations report, which was published in October 2022.

Full report can be found at here

In 2023 we will be working with partners to roll out these recommendations across the region.

Regional MECC: We hosted a MECC roundtable event with the healthcare quality team at NHSE which had representation from across the North West exploring ICS current and future plans for MECC. In 2023 we will continue to bring this group back together to encourage sharing learning across the regions.

Applied Behavioural & Social Science facilitated workshops for public health teams across the Northwest.

We are currently working in partnership with the Behavioural Science & Public Health network to deliver a series of action learning sets for public health staff across the NW

The aim of the workshops is to build public health capacity & capability in the application of behavioural and social science approaches to address locally agreed public health priorities in each of our three ICS footprint areas.

The first session was delivered by Paul Chadwick – a renowned subject matter expert in behaviour change, Associate Professor, University College London and Deputy Director, Centre for Behaviour Change. 20 of the 23 public health teams were able to participate on the day and a diverse range of public health projects discussed that could potentially be used to apply the learning to.

We look forward to the remaining sessions that will be delivered between now and March – culminating in a shared showcase event that will provide participants the opportunity to share their experience of the learning programme and interventions they planned together.

Further detail about the events and work to date is available here.

Embedding Public Health into Clinical Settings

Following the successful evaluation of the clinician’s toolkit for prevention delivered in 2020 – 2021 and 2021 – 22 respectively, the NW team are pleased to announce that additional funding from the national Long Term Conditions and Prevention team (LTCP) will enable them to lead on delivering this development offer to the health & care sector across three regional footprints. The project will be externally evaluated and will allow a minimum of 40 participants to plan, deliver and evaluate a public health project of their choice within their own healthcare setting with support and additional learning. We now have a delivery team in place and the project will take place in early 2023.

Understanding Training Needs

In partnership with OHID we undertook the second North West Public Health Training Needs Survey which saw a 50% increase of completion rates from last year. The results from the survey will shape what work we deliver over the next 12 months to ensure we are needs lead supporting our colleagues working within Public Health.

Workforce Matters

NW Public Health Workforce Matters group has been established. This is a new regional forum with representation from all three ICB areas and DPH groups across the region to promote collaboration on Public Health Workforce programmes of work in the North West.

The aims of the group is to:

Provide and promote Public Health WD system leadership.
Support workforce planning and analysis work for the Public Health workforce.
Support Public Health capacity and capability building in the wider Public Health workforce.
Support Public Health capacity and capability building in the Public Health workforce.

Population Health Fellowship Programme (cohort 3)

In September, 11 population health fellows started on cohort 3 of the fellowship – at a national welcome event led by the LTC & Prevention Team.

This is an opportunity for NHS clinical staff across the multi-professional team to develop skills in population health. The fellowship targets early to mid-career registered healthcare professionals providing NHS services (AfC band 6 and above, or equivalent; dentists-in-training; doctors-in-training post-FY2 and their SAS equivalent). The aim of the fellowship is to develop a network of clinicians from a non-population health background with population health skills to benefit place-based healthcare systems across England.

It is a 1-year part-time programme at 2 days a week alongside clinical practice. Population Health Fellows will lead on a population health project and will be supported by a blended mostly online and virtual learning programme.

More information on the different fellowships taking place can be found here

Communications and Engagement

We have been fortunate this year to have had additional capacity in the team with the recruitment of our new project manager who started with us at the end of April 20022 and additional support staff. Since joining HEE Nick has made an invaluable contribution to the programme of work, particularly regarding our communications and engagement activity. We have seen a rise in the numbers attending our webinars, using the website and our newsletter (though temporarily stopped due to staff shortages) has increased in terms of numbers signing up!