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Agenda item

Report of the Chief Officer for Communities, Public Health, Environment and Prosperity, attached.

Minutes:

The Board received the report of the Chief Officer for Communities, Public Health, Environment and Prosperity on the Health Protection Committee Annual Report (2018-19), which provided a summary of the assurance functions of the Devon, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Health Protection Committee and reviewed performance for the period from 1 April 2018 to 31 March 2019. 

 

The report considered the following domains of Health Protection:

 

·       Communicable disease control and environmental hazards

·       Immunisation and screening

·       Health care associated infections and antimicrobial resistance

 

The aim of the Health Protection Committee was to provide assurance to the local Health and Wellbeing Boards that adequate arrangements were in place for prevention, surveillance, planning and response to communicable disease and environmental hazards, to protect the public’s health. 

 

The following priorities for the period 2019/20 had been agreed by all Health Protection Committee members and reflected areas for focused work in order to meet identified health protection needs for the populations of Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. 

 

·       Integrating and strengthening the Health Protection system - all members would continue to work collaboratively to build a resilient workforce and maximise opportunities to strengthen health protection within emerging integrated health and social care system;

·       Surveillance and intelligence – the Health Protection Committee would continue to drive improvements to the local health protection system through improved and more timely intelligence and surveillance along with more effective performance monitoring mechanisms;

·       Cancer and non-cancer screening programmes - all members had agreed to work more closely with partners to drive improvements in screening uptake, to improve the quality of our screening programmes and to reduce inequalities;

·       Immunisation locality groups – all members would support the implementation or refresh of immunisation locality groups for Devon, Torbay, Plymouth, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly;

·       MMR vaccination programme – all members would continue to support work to increase uptake of the MMR vaccination with the ambitious aim of achieving and then sustaining >95% coverage of the second dose of MMR by 5 years of age;

·       Pandemic flu – an ongoing priority for 2019/20 was to continue to support local planning arrangements for pandemic flu and to strengthen our response to major incidents and emergencies;

·       Seasonal flu vaccination programme – all members would continue efforts to ensure high uptake of flu vaccinations locally, particularly amongst at risk groups and frontline health and social care workers;

·       Community Infection Prevention and Control – all members would work to ensure that community infection prevention control was embedded and supported within emerging Integrated Care System structures to strengthen the local health protection system;

·       Antimicrobial resistance - all members would support action taken by both the Devon AMR Group and the Cornwall Antimicrobial Resistance Group (CARG) to tackle antimicrobial resistance;

·       Complex lives – all members would support work locally to address health protection challenges for people with complex lives;

·       Climate change – all members would lead and support local action following declaration of a climate change emergency, including assurance that action was being taken to secure improvements to air quality where required.

 

RESOLVED that the Health Protection Committee Annual Report 2018-19 be noted and accepted.

 

Supporting documents:


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