Better Health For All

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. You can learn more about the tool, the data it presents, and how to use it here.

Tools like this one are aimed at local decision-makers, such as senior council officers, to help inform their investment decisions. This will be especially useful when, at some future date, the public health grant fence is removed. At the moment, the tool 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)

Based on feedback, PHE (Public Health England) and the Faculty of Public Health (FPH) have embarked on a partnership to consider the inclusion of wider determinants of health indicators in the tool and ensure that the voice of the public health workforce is reflected in the final outcome. Our members believe that if this tool is really going to help them make the case in their local authority for more investment for the interventions or services that keep us healthy and well, then indicators that speak to places, sustainability, good jobs, and community cohesion need to be included alongside the mandated services.

However, there are potentially hundreds of ‘wider determinants of health’ (WDOH) indicators that could be included in the tool. To come up with a manageable list of indicators to consider in more detail, we surveyed FPH members about influence and impact. Here is a summary of what they told us:

The Top 5 indicators that councils can influence

• Active transport
• Number of premises licensed to sell alcohol per square kilometre
• Density of fast food outlets within 400 metres of schools
• Density of fast food outlets
• Access to parks and recreation spaces

The Top 5 indicators that impact health and wellbeing of local residents

• Overcrowded households
• Social isolation in adult social care users
• Fuel poverty
• Statutory homelessness
• Active transport

The survey findings provided us with a wealth of information about influence, impact, and future priorities for our members in terms of the work that they are currently doing locally and also what they think will become more important over the next 2-3 years.

We then used our survey findings to inform two workshops held in London and Birmingham in early November. The workshops were attended by FPH members working in local authorities. Over the course of two afternoons, we had lively and interesting debates about the indicators and how a simple tool like the dashboard could best represent a complex area, such as the wider determinants.

The PHE team is still considering the next steps in terms of how – or indeed if – to incorporate the WDOH indicators into the tool. We hope to use the findings from this work to do a larger project, examining how our members and others working public health can better influence spending in their local authority to tackle the wider determinants of health.

If you would like to get involved in our work or learn more about this project, please email policy@fph.org.uk or click here.

Written by Lisa Plotkin, Senior Policy Officer, FPH