Coventry Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2019-2023

One Health and Care Partnership, two Health and Wellbeing Boards, three Outcomes, four Places

There are a million reasons to be ambitious about living a healthy and fulfilling life in Coventry and Warwickshire. Together, as organisations working to improve health and wellbeing, we share a common vision:.

We will do everything in our power to enable people across Coventry and Warwickshire to pursue happy, healthy lives and put people at the heart of everything we do.

We believe every single one of our one million residents deserves to:

• LEAD a healthy, independent and fulfilled life
• BE PART of a strong community
• EXPERIENCE effective and sustainable health and care services

Over the last three years we have been working together on this vision. We now want to use it to change the way we understand population health, prevent illnesses and design services to meet people’s often increasingly complex needs over the next 5-10 years.

The NHS Long Term Plan will be a catalyst for change in Coventry and Warwickshire, but we aren’t stopping there.

We will look at our health and care services and wider factors that can have an impact on living a heathy, independent and fulfilling life. We will be linking up our Five-Year Plan to both of our refreshed local Health and Wellbeing Strategies.

We have been listening to what local people and our staff have been telling us about what is important to them, and that is now driving a new way of working. Our first important step is the creation of a new Heath and Care Partnership Board, which will meet in public, to oversee the transformation of health and care within Coventry and Warwickshire by building a new relationship between individuals and communities and the services they use.

The Coventry and Warwickshire Health and Care Partnership brings together health and social care services, local authorities, voluntary and community sector organisations and other partners. Our aim is to deliver life-long health and wellbeing benefits for the people of Coventry and Warwickshire.

In order to make this happen we are making the following commitments:

• Prevention will be at the centre of everything we do. We are committed to promoting health and wellbeing rather than treating illness. As organisations responsible for public money we will change where we spend our money to promote health and wellbeing. Through earlier intervention, we’re aiming to make it easier for everyone to lead healthy lives and stay well for longer.
• Health must not be viewed in isolation. We recognise the importance of education, good work, affordable and appropriate housing, leisure opportunities and a healthy environment to the quality of life of local people. We need to work together to improve the overall health of our population and address inequalities by reducing the health and wellbeing gap that exists between our most deprived and affluent areas.
• We all need to do more to look after our own health and wellbeing so that we depend less on our local health and social care services, while knowing they are there when we need them. Voluntary organisations and community groups play an enormous role in keeping people healthy and independent and we will change how we work with communities to enable community leadership and build capacity. We will do more to support carers too, not only to improve the health of family members they care for, but also their own health and wellbeing.
• When people need support from health and social care services, we know that they want accessible, responsive and high-quality services and we will provide them. We will have a focus on making sure that services deliver the right standard of care in a consistent way across Coventry and Warwickshire that builds on best practice and evidence.
• We will be honest about the challenges we face. Demands on health care services continue to increase, alongside a shortage of key staff groups and skills to deliver care and financial pressures to deal with. While the amount of money we spend in the NHS is going up each year, the cost of services is going up more quickly, so we need to identify ways to deliver the same level of services at a lower cost – for example, through reducing waste and avoiding the duplication of services. We will work together to ensure we are always doing what’s right for individuals and make it easier for people to access the right service, the first time.
• There will be times when we need to make difficult decisions, but when we do, we will listen to the views of local people and our staff, and we will have transparent processes for making those decisions.