Healthy Southwark

Over the past year, Southwark Health and Social Care has delivered a wide range of health improvement programmes, including policy development and implementation of face-to-face targeted health promotion activity, most of which was funded by the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund.

This is delivered under the auspices of the Healthy Southwark Partnership, the health improvement partnership for the borough. Chris Bull, the Chief Executive of Southwark PCT, chairs the partnership board and membership is drawn from across the voluntary and community, statutory and acute sectors. The board has responsibility for ensuring the delivery of health improvement strategies for the borough, which are designed to improve the health and wellbeing of all those who live and work in Southwark.

The partnership supports work on obesity, tobacco, mental health promotion and sexual health. However, current priorities are obesity and tobacco. Both of these are major causes of ill health and early death. Unless these two are addressed together it is predicted that the number of children under 15 in Southwark who are obese and smoking will triple by 2010.

Outcomes

• the Health Promotion Outreach team has led a range of activities in the priority neighbourhoods and made over 6,000 contacts with local people. They organised physical activity events such as the women-only swimming sessions at Downside Fisher youth club
• the Men’s Health Outreach team took health promotion to the Royal Mail depot in Bermondsey where male staff benefited from several early morning sessions. During these sessions, the men were able to get blood pressure and cholesterol checks and healthy eating advice
• a conference at Millwall Football Club which put men’s health firmly on the agenda for local services. The team’s efforts won them a Best Team award at the Southwark Health and Social Care Awards
• the Strategic Gaps programme delivered six major projects aimed at improving the health of children and young people. These ranged from the creation of four breastfeeding cafes to working with the voluntary groups and organisations about healthy eating
• Young Southwark and the Healthy Southwark Partnership worked together to co-ordinate a comprehensive survey of heights and weights among Southwark’s primary school children at Years 0 (Reception) and Year 6
• the Aylesbury Healthy Living Network continued to offer support to the residents of the Aylesbury Estate. There have been many fun events such as line dancing and yoga, which have been well attended. The Multilingual Community Rights Workshop also ran many advice sessions on benefits to the non-English speaking people in the community.

Forthcoming work
The development of the ‘Healthier Communities and Older People’ strand of the Local Area Agreement will be the focus of much activity in the coming months. The work supporting obesity and tobacco is encouraging. A new Health Improvement team has been created to take these priorities forward in an integrated way across the borough.

The Food School at Borough Market is another exciting development in which Healthy Southwark is a key player. Ten people have already being trained to run the course and a further 20 local people will be encouraged to do this in 2006.

Healthy Southwark is also collaborating with the PCT’s commissioning team to undertake a review of physical activity and exercise services. It is also developing a health inequalities strategic framework with the Equality & Diversity team.