Place Plan
Our approach to population health
A population health approach aims to improve the health of an entire population, in a defined area, whilst reducing health inequalities. In addition to delivering appropriate and high-quality health and care services, it also includes actions to reduce the occurrence of ill health and seeks to influence the wider determinants of health. This requires partners to work closely with individuals, communities, and wider partner agencies.
Our approach to population health in Cheshire West is based on the King’s Fund four pillars of population health:
Pillar 1: The wider determinants of health
Pillar 2: The places and communities we live in
Pillar 3: Our health behaviours and lifestyles
Pillar 4: An integrated health and care system
A healthy and happy Cheshire West: The wider determinants of health; The places and communities we live in; Our health behaviours and lifestyles; An integrated health and care system.
The following infographic illustrates what the composition of Cheshire West and Chester would be like if it was a village of 100 people based on the information gathered from various data sets:
If Cheshire West and Chester was a village of 100 people
Whilst most of our residents report ‘good’ or ‘very good’ health (82 people in our village of 100), there are also people living in poor health or at greater risk of poor health. For example, in our village we have 21 adults reporting high anxiety, 22 adults who are obese and 16 people who live in areas ranked in the 20% most deprived in England.
Our approach to population health is supported by population health management, bringing together health, care and wider data, intelligence, and analytics to identify groups within the population to support. This helps partners providing health, social care, and wider support to share knowledge, learn from it and then work together to provide care more effectively.
Locally, in Cheshire West, we are using data to identify people who are at higher risk of their health deteriorating, so that local services can better support individuals. For example, we compare and investigate correlations between people who attend NHS appointments and wider determinants on a geographical basis. This is then mapped against a broad range of nationally published indicators to produce data packs at a Community Partnership level (see Pillar 4 for a description of our Community Partnerships). The areas with a high prevalence of particular conditions are then identified not only at a Community Partnership level, but across the whole of Cheshire West.
The population health and population health management approaches enable us to work more closely with partners beyond the health and care system, identifying how to work together to strengthen ill-health prevention; simplify how people can access services; and attempt to solve the interlinked wider social problems that prevent improvement in health outcomes. We are currently developing the approach to create stratification models and linking various data sets.
