Coventry Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA)

Demographics and community

Harnessing the city’s growth and diversity

• The city must be prepared for a growing, changing and increasingly diverse population. Due to uncertainty in understanding future population growth, a deeper analysis of Coventry demographics and its population estimates, and projection may be useful. With the anticipated growth in older people, there is a need to focus on preventative health amongst the working age population.
• Some areas are more diverse than others with population growth concentrated in certain parts of the city, which should be a consideration when reviewing service provision.
• Utilising community assets to help address specific needs and present opportunities for local residents to actively get involved.
• Grassroot organisations promote community cohesion and could achieve greater success with additional funding for expanding their capabilities and exchanging knowledge.
• The public sector has a responsibility to change how it works with community groups across and between sectors. There is appetite across local and voluntary organisations for more joined up working to improve awareness and communication of the activities and networks available in the city.
• Partners across Coventry must consider appropriate messaging to address local anxieties, stakeholder groups are essential in addressing issues in specific neighbourhoods.
• It is important for Coventry to deliver effective integration support to newly arrived communities to provide a solid foundation for newcomers to rebuild their lives, and subsequently become socially and economically independent.

Prospects

Helping people to access opportunities and thrive

• Giving every child the best start in life is crucial for securing health and reducing health inequalities across the life course. Therefore, investment in effective early help has a positive impact on the lives of children and young people and is a high priority. This can be aided by strengthening the availability and accessibility of general information and advice to parents.
• Schools and colleges play a pivotal role in raising the aspirations of young people and can continue to raise aspirations by improving awareness of the significant and growing opportunities in highly paid jobs available in the city, which require people with the right skills and qualifications.
• It's important that residents aren’t left behind in being able to access digital opportunities.
• Community assets are crucial to health through the opportunities and services they provide and indirectly, through a sense of empowerment and control.

Environment

Connected, safe and sustainable communities

• There is opportunity to work with communities to protect and improve existing green space and create new ones in areas most in need, and to implement nature-based interventions for health, such as green walking or green social prescribing.
• Initiatives to tackle climate change present opportunities for public services, and the private and third sector to work closer together to bolster community resilience and address inequalities in the wider environmental determinants of health.
• A more detailed understanding of local needs should be developed through the place-based JSNA profiles, to address pockets of dissatisfaction with local neighbourhoods, and issues such as access and affordability of housing and local air quality.
• A joined-up approach is essential for tackling the city’s homelessness and rough sleeping problem, recognising the intersection of severe and multiple disadvantages faced by people.
• Partners should look to provide more opportunities for people to shape services, including involving people with lived experiences.
• Green corridors form an important element of the landscape within Coventry, however there are some barriers to accessing these spaces that need to be addressed. Further work is required to address perceptions of anti-social behaviour, personal safety, dog fouling and access issues relating to volumes of traffic, busy roads and safety concerns for cyclists. Further investment is also required to improve the quality and facilities of some green spaces.

Health and wellbeing

Healthy and independent for longer

• As life expectancy is below average and health outcomes are worse in more deprived areas, a targeted approach of appropriate support to each group is essential to improve health and wellbeing for all groups.
• Further study may be useful to understand the impact of COVID 19 in Coventry and it differs from the national picture overall.
• A more detailed analysis of causes of death in Coventry, and their contribution to heath inequality may be useful. As well as an analysis of the diseases and causes of ill health and disability.
• Ensuring communities understand and trust public health messages, and that they are accessible and culturally appropriate is vital.
• Building on existing health and wellbeing infrastructures having a collaborative partnership approach, bringing together residents’ experience and partners’ skills and assets, should be taken to strengthen health and wellbeing in communities.
• In line with the shift to focus on prevention, a community-informed and culturally competent approach is essential to increasing screening and vaccination rates.
• Digital Access adds another dimension to inequalities of access to healthcare and should be a consideration.

Approach

Working together in our places and with our communities.

Health is determined by people’s social circumstances such as their communities, prospects and environment; and similarly, this approach to addressing and improving these circumstances must also be rooted in local people and communities. Growing this capacity in the communities require improving connectivity. This can be done by:

• distributing leadership – valuing the community leaders that are already working in this space as they have the trust, networks, understanding and legitimacy, and getting behind existing partnerships; 
• joining forces – getting the public sector to work together by pooling resources to build capacity and connections, investing resources to enable communities to maximise social action; 
• grassroots activities – making social action activities across the different sectors more visible; and 
• forging links – building links and generating connectivity by helping partners and communities share what they do, and helping them learn from, and build partnerships, with each other.