Pillar 2: The places and communities we live in

Giving every child the best start in life is crucial to reducing health inequalities across the life course. The best start in life begins with a loving and secure relationship with parents, carers, and family. This underpins a child’s brain and language development, their ability to learn, their emotional wellbeing, and their capacity to form and maintain positive relationships with others.

The All Together Fairer Health and Care Partnership Plan further outlines the importance of tackling childhood poverty through providing access to affordable housing, good education, jobs and sustainable transport. This is key to reducing inequalities. We want to create a safe environment that ensures children and young people have the best foundations, are ready to start school, and can thrive and develop skills enabling them to achieve their full potential. Cheshire and Merseyside ICB are part of the Children’s Health Equity Collaborative and working in partnership with Barnardo’s and the IHE to develop a new Children and Young People’s Equity Framework and trial new interventions to drive action to improve child health and address inequalities.

The Health and Care Partnership Plan also prioritises a focus on early years to help improve our breastfeeding rates, support a reduction in childhood excess weight and maintain the uptake of childhood immunisation. It will also help reduce the risk and the impact of adverse childhood experiences to enable children and young people to achieve their full potential and have longer happier lives.

In addition, improving children and young people’s mental wellbeing will have a positive effect on their cognitive development, learning, physical and mental health, and social and economic prospects in adulthood.

We want to join up further early help services based on a clear understanding of local needs, including emerging national challenges such as child exploitation. Risks to positive emotional health and wellbeing must also be addressed, including parental substance misuse, and the impact of parental conflict and domestic violence. Mental health services need to be available and accessible for all who need them.

We will:

• ensure our trauma informed approach and practice model ‘Our Way of Working’ supports and underpins all our priorities and the way we support children, young people and families
• ensure children in our care receive timely and responsive health assessments and dental checks
• increase the percentage of children in our care and care leavers who are in education, training or employment
• support our young carers
• enable and support families to provide the best care and support they can to their children and when this is not possible, acting as responsible and responsive corporate parents to children in our care and to care leavers
• make sure that the crucial role of the Community Sector is maximised
• intervene at the earliest stage possible to prevent problems for children, young people and their families escalating and promote good social, emotional and psychological health to protect children and young people against behavioural and health problems
• review inequitable outcomes in early years and bring the system together to ensure equitable early intervention, involving all partners (e.g., education, social care - children's services, communities and Community Sector, children’s boards, public services, NHS, and Local Authority partners)
• assess early years provision and parental support and provide further support for early years settings in more deprived areas, in collaboration with communities in these areas and / or for example, families with disabilities, or with English as a second language
• assess how the Adverse Childhood Experience agenda links to the early years approach and ensure families voices are included in this agenda
• move towards a neurodiversity approach for children and young people to focus on addressing and meeting needs inclusively
• act locally to reduce child poverty
• increase breast feeding rates
• increase the numbers of children who are a healthy weight by promoting physical activity and a healthy diet
• working with Cheshire and Merseyside ICB, improve Oral Health for children, working collaboratively with Health Visitors and those within Early Years settings
• support the development of the Children and Young People’s Equity Framework
• work with the Core20PLUS5 model to support an integrated care system approach to driving action in health inequalities improvement to reduce healthcare inequalities for our children and young people.

The Cheshire and Merseyside NHS Delivery Plan also outlines the importance of increasing the vaccination uptake for children and young people towards the levels recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).