Better Health For All

We’re delighted that the Public Health Dashboard has now been officially released and would like to thank all of those who fed in to its development over the past year.

In this blog, we’re pleased to share our thoughts on how, in your work across public health and local government, you can use the dashboard to help you in prioritising resources to improve the public’s health. And, we’re also pleased to let you know about some further work that Public Health England and the UK’s Faculty of Public Health (FPH) will be carrying forward jointly over the remainder of this year, offering further opportunities for the public health workforce to shape the Public Health Dashboard.

What is the Public Health Dashboard?

The Public Health Dashboard is an online, easy to use tool providing information at your fingertips on a number of indicators related to local activity to improve the public’s health and wellbeing. Its development was part of a wider Government drive to support transparency and local accountability for delivery across all public services and not just public health. You can learn more about the tool, the data it presents and how to use it here.

How can it be used?

If you’ve been following the development of the dashboard then you’ll know that Directors of Public Health and their teams are not its primary intended user audience. Rather, the dashboard is aimed at local decision-makers, such as senior council officers, to help inform their investment decisions and better support them to prioritise resource when it comes to improving the public’s health.

Tools like this one that help a non-public health professional audience make good public health investment decisions will be especially needed once the public health grant ring-fence is removed at some future date. We also hope that members of the public, the voluntary sector, and service providers will use the dashboard to learn more about service provision in their area and how it compares to other areas.

However, we also think that the public health workforce will find considerable value in using the Dashboard. When FPH was speaking to its members about some of the challenges they encounter when advocating for public health investment and influencing to achieve better health outcomes, they said that it was sometimes difficult to demonstrate the value of public health, in all of its complexity, in a way that was intelligible to a non-specialist audience. This is one of the reasons why FPH’s project on the future of public health funding includes a call for an improved dashboard tool — to help the public health community get better at making its case for resource and telling its story.

So, it’s our hope that public health teams will use the Public Health Dashboard to:

• Champion investment in public health services
• Raise the profile of public health with politicians and local residents
• Help make the case clearly and simply for decisions about public health resource allocation priorities
• Enable greater scrutiny of public health service delivery at the local level that can drive improvements in public health outcomes

What next?

At the moment the Public Health Dashboard includes the following local authority service areas:

• Best start in life
• Child obesity
• Drug treatment
• Alcohol treatment
• NHS Health Checks
• Sexual and reproductive health
• Tobacco control
• Air quality (interim indicator)

You’ll notice that, with the exception of air quality, the dashboard doesn’t currently include an indicator on the wider determinants of health. This is because it only includes indicators where there’s a clear relationship between council activity and public health service delivery.

However, based on feedback from FPH’s members and others, we’re now keen to further consider the potential for including indicators for the wider determinants of health in the dashboard. We agree with those who told us that it’s important for the Dashboard to reflect the context and environment in which service delivery is occurring and to facilitate a more place-based approach to public health priorities and investment at the local level.

That’s why over the coming months, PHE and FPH will together consult with FPH’s members and the wider public health community regarding the potential inclusion of wider determinants indicators to feature in the Public Health Dashboard. We’ll do this over a series of workshops in the autumn to develop a group of wider determinants indicators that meet the criteria for inclusion in the Dashboard. We know this is a complex and broad topic and we’re committed to taking the time to make sure we continue to engage with the public health community on it as the Public Health Dashboard develops.

Written by Richard Gleave, Deputy Chief Executive and Chief Operating Officer, Public Health England, and Professor John Middleton, President, FPH.