NHS Prevention Pledge (Cheshire & Merseyside)

The Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership has commissioned Food Active’s parent charity, Health Equalities Group, to develop a ‘prevention pledge’ that will support local NHS Provider Trusts in scaling up evidence-based interventions to address non-communicable diseases.

Influence Policy:

Developing a Pledge which enables Trusts to become anchor institutions and systems leaders in prevention, offers a coordinated and consistent approach to addressing prevention within secondary and tertiary care. The Pledge will aim to encourage NHS provider Trusts to consider how services and environments are shaped to promote and support good health and increased healthy life expectancy, supporting prevention commitments set out with the NHS Long term Plan.

The Pledge will build on Cheshire and Merseyside Population Health Framework to enable Trusts to become anchor institutions and systems leaders in prevention. This will include taking actions to embed MECC, preventing ill-health CQUINS, maximising social value and health promoting environments. Such actions will help create the conditions for a healthier workforce, patients and wider communities encouraging changes to diet, physical activity, smoking and alcohol and in doing so reducing a range of non-communicable diseases

What are the next steps in developing the pledge?

HEG are continuing to facilitate the first phase of consultation; to conduct a number of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders.

The interviews will gather further insight on the approach set out within this paper, identify content for the evidence base for the prevention commitments within the pledge and collate local intelligence.

Outcomes of the interviews will be collated and utilised to support the development of the evidence base and draft commitments for the Pledge.
Wider stakeholder engagement and a second phase of consultation on the Pledge commitments will be facilitated via local stakeholder workshops in later 2019. These workshops will be an opportunity for stakeholders from within NHS provider Trusts to reach consensus on a set of draft core commitments that will form the basis of the Prevention Pledge.

HEG will continue to provide regular updates to the Cheshire and Merseyside Prevention Board (interim feedback on the latest stakeholder interviews to be reported at September’s meeting).
There will be regular communications and briefings to wider stakeholders on progress and to build engagement.

Evaluation Report from Institute of Health Equity on Phases 1 & 2 of NHS Prevention Pledge (Published April 2022)