Champs Public Health Collaborative

• 24 April 2019
• Posted in: Healthcare

Champs Public Health Collaborative
Champs Public Health Collaborative is a long-standing collaboration between the nine Directors of Public Health (DsPH) and their teams, serving 2.5 million people across Cheshire & Merseyside. Over fifteen years the Champs Collaborative has developed a comprehensive and systematic approach to improving public health priorities by large scale action and working together as system leaders across the region.
The purpose of Champs Public Health Collaborative is to improve local health and wellbeing outcomes by collective strategic action; enable and deliver strong public health system leadership; promote effective and innovative public health interventions and the use of the latest evidence; facilitate shared learning, expertise and peer support and collectively commission cost-effective sub-regional public health programmes and interventions.
This collaborative approach has recently been acknowledged as an example of good practice with a feature in the Parliamentary Review for 2019.

Cheshire & Merseyside - Prevention and the Health and Care Partnership
The establishment of the Health and Care Partnership (HCP) provided Cheshire & Merseyside DsPH with a significant opportunity to focus on prevention and early intervention as system leaders on behalf of Local Authorities.
The Cheshire & Merseyside (C&M) HCP enabled a new approach to cross boundary working and delivering prevention at scale. Champs Collaborative worked closely with the C&M HCP during its early submission, offering recommendations to establish a number of prevention priorities. These are:
• Alcohol harm
• Anti-microbial resistance
• Tackling high blood pressure

This close working relationship between the Champs Collaborative and the C&M HCP has continued, ensuring that the prevention priorities are embedded into future plans for the region. Following the formation of the C&M Health & Care Partnership Prevention Board, a further prevention priority of Physical Activity was added.

The overall aim of the C&M HCP is for prevention to be embedded strategically and operationally in all pathways. With this in mind, Making Every Contact Count (MECC) was adopted as a new priority for 2018, as a whole system change enabler. MECC is a brief behaviour change intervention, designed for anyone in a public context to be able to help signpost an individual to healthy lifestyle information.

A new C&M Population Health Framework has also been created as a vehicle for delivery of prevention across the whole system. It sets out evidence based guidelines partners can use to create a transformational and sustainable shift in the health and wellbeing of the C&M population.

Progress on priorities to date

Significant work is being planned and implemented on the prevention priorities laid out above:

Alcohol harm reduction
The alcohol working group has developed a plan to improve the treatment and prevention of alcohol misuse across C&M. They have set out a number of actions for scaling-up action to identify, treat, and prevent alcohol misuse within healthcare settings. These include developing a C&M common alcohol pathway for consistency in quality of care and developing a common training and competency programme for alcohol services in acute trusts.

Anti-microbial resistance
The C&M AMR Board was established in 2018 with the aim of reducing antibiotic resistance through tackling inappropriate prescribing. Membership includes consultant microbiologists, GPs, medicines management and public health. For each place based care systems an action plan will be developed and a working group established. Across the three areas there will be one antimicrobial formulary / guidance.

Tackling high blood pressure
The "Saving lives: Reducing the pressure" five year strategy for tackling high blood pressure (BP) in C&M has helped to drive forward well-established areas of work which are already taking place in C&M. Through British Heart Foundation funding BP checks have been rolled out in a number of community settings (including community pharmacies and through Mersey Fire and Rescue Service Safe and Well checks) with 10,000 new case BP checks having taken place over 18 months. A second round of funding has recently been received to train staff to take BP measurements in local workplaces.
A ‘Happy Hearts’ CVD Prevention website for C&M has been created offering members of the public information on how to prevent high blood pressure and other CVD related disease.
General Practice BP quality improvement work is also being conducted, with nine general practices from across C&M being offered support to implement best practice for diagnosis and management of patients with high blood pressure.

For more information on Champs Public Health Collaborative visit www.champspublichealth.com
For further information on our work on prevention with the C&M HCP please contact Helen Cartwright helencartwright@wirral.gov.uk