Croydon’s Draft Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy (2024-2029) consultation

Refreshing Croydon’s Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy – your views matter!

Do you work, live or study in Croydon? Between 15 January and 26 February 2024, we are asking for your views on Croydon’s draft Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy for 2024–2029.

Croydon's Health and Wellbeing Board and the Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy

Croydon’s Health and Wellbeing Board is a statutory board of Croydon Council, bringing together partners from the council, the NHS, Healthwatch Croydon, our Voluntary and Community Sector, and other key stakeholders. The board’s mission is to improve the health and wellbeing of our local people and communities and tackle health inequalities in Croydon.

The Board is refreshing the Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy for 2024-2029. This strategy will set out how organisations across Croydon will work together over the next five years to support our residents and communities to live longer and healthier lives.

Draft Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy (2024-2029)

How did we develop the draft strategy?

When developing the draft strategy:

1. We looked at what data and evidence told us about our health and wellbeing needs. To do this, we reviewed our Joint Strategic Needs Assessment, which is a collection of data, insights and evidence on the state of health and wellbeing in Croydon.
2. We sought the views of our local people and communities. To understand what our local people and communities see as their important health and wellbeing needs, we reviewed our community engagement activities in the borough since 2018, hearing from more that 3,700 voices. We also reviewed the Community Plans of our six Local Community Partnerships. These plans identify priority areas each Local Community Partnership has agreed to collectively focus on to improve health and wellbeing and tackle health inequalities in their area. Lastly, we held a community engagement session with Healthwatch Croydon in November 2023, where participants provided their views on the draft strategy.

What is our proposed vision for 2024-2029?

Our vision describes what we want to achieve in Croydon in relation to our health and wellbeing in the long term. Our proposed vision for 2024-2029:

“In Croydon, everybody is enabled to lead a healthy, happy and fulfilling life, supported by safe, healthy and thriving communities and neighbourhoods. We work together and build on our strengths to actively tackle inequalities and improve our health and wellbeing.”

What are our proposed priority areas for 2024-2029?

To achieve this vision, our proposed priority areas for 2024-2029 are:

1. Good mental health and wellbeing for all
2. Cost of living: supporting our residents to ‘eat, sleep and have heat’
3. Healthy, safe and well-connected neighbourhoods and communities
4. Supporting our children, young people and families
5. Supporting our older population to live healthy independent and fulfilling lives.

These strategic priority areas provide the key focus for the Health and Wellbeing Board over the next five years, so that we can make a real difference to the health and wellbeing of our local people and communities. However, we know that we have many more health and wellbeing needs in the borough. Having these priority areas for focus does not mean we will stop addressing other important needs.

How will we work together to make a difference in our health and wellbeing?

Our guiding principles will steer our decisions and actions towards our priorities.

Our proposed guiding principles are:

1. Tackling health inequalities: We will aim to reduce, and where possible, prevent health inequalities. In addition to taking action to improve the health and wellbeing of everybody in Croydon, we will take action to improve the health of the most disadvantaged groups of people and reduce the gap between the best and the worst off, in terms of health inequalities.
2. Prevention across the life course: We will take a prevention-first approach to prevent ill health from happening in the first place. We will embed principles of prevention across the life course, ensuring that our residents have the necessary tools and support throughout their lives to lead healthy and independent lives. We will aim to identify and tackle issues at the earliest possible opportunity to prevent them from getting worse.
3. Integrated partnership working: We will continue to improve integrated partnership working across health and social care at the local level, capitalising on the accomplishments of the One Croydon Alliance. We will actively engage in integrated partnership initiatives throughout South West London. We will endeavour to use our collective resources effectively, efficiently and sustainably, enabling our residents to find the right support, at the right time and at the right place.
4. Community focus and co-production: We are committed to taking a community-centric approach striving to shift more services to community settings, enabling community-led support to improve health and wellbeing. We will work in partnership with our residents and communities, recognising and building on their strengths.
5. Evidence-informed decisions and actions: We will base our strategic decisions and actions, including our commissioning, on the best available evidence. This principle ensures that our actions are effective, efficient, and aligned with the evolving needs of our communities. We will establish clear oversight and monitoring processes to assess the impact of our strategies and actions.

For more information, please see the supporting documents on the right-hand side.

The documents located on the right-hand side of this page provide more information on the draft strategy:

1. Draft Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy (2024-2029) for consultation: this document presents background information on the strategy and provides information on the proposed vision, guiding principles and priority areas of focus.
2. Draft Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy (2024-2029) on a page: this document summarises the draft strategy on a page.
3. Summary of Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (November 2023): this document summarises Croydon’s Joint Strategic Needs Assessment, bringing together data, evidence and insights on the state of health and wellbeing in Croydon.

Share your thoughts

It is really important to us to hear your views and thoughts on whether we have the vision, guiding principles and key priorities in the draft strategy to meet your health and wellbeing needs.

Please share your views by completing our online survey (see link below) by 11.59pm, 26 February 2024.This survey should take around 15-20 minutes to complete.

If you have any questions about the Draft Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy (2024-2029) or if you need a paper copy of the consultation questionnaire to be sent to you, please contact the project team at shifa.sarica@croydon.gov.uk.

What happens after the consultation?

Findings from this public consultation will shape the final strategy that will be formally agreed by the Health and Wellbeing Board in 2024. The final strategy will be published on the council website.

You said, we did - see our final strategy here: Croydon Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2024 - 2029

Privacy statement:

Personal data submitted (including any equalities data) will be processed in accordance with the requirements of the UK General Data Protection Regulations. Data will only be used for the purposes of the consultation. Details will not be shared or published. By participating, you agree to your data being used in this way. For the purposes of this survey, we are asking for some equalities questions.

We will not keep your personal information for longer than is necessary. Where your information is held for a set period of time this will always be supported by a legal reason. These reasons are set out in our document retention policy. If you wish to see the retention schedule you can send your request to informationmanagement@croydon.gov.uk.

For further information on how we use, share and protect your personal data in compliance with our legal requirements under the GDPR 2018 and Data Protection Act 2018, please refer to the Council’s Corporate Privacy Notice:

Croydon Council's Privacy Statement: https://www.croydon.gov.uk/council-and-elections/privacy-and-open-data/privacy-notices/corporate-privacy-notice