Promoting equality is at the heart of our values. We will commission services fairly, so that no community or group is left behind in the improvements we make across the area. This is especially important as we work towards the challenges faced by the NHS, set out in the Five Year Forward View.

Guidance for commissioners on meeting legal duties for equality and health inequalities also supports our work.

The CCG works closely with its local public health team to ensure we fully understand our local community and all engagement and involvement meets the needs of the most vulnerable to ensure they are fully engaged and their voices are heard.

Health in summary

In St Helens there are wide differences between wards in both health and wellbeing measures and indicators of the wider determinants of health.

The health of people in St Helens is generally worse than the England average. St Helens is one of the 20% most deprived districts/unitary authorities in England and about 25% (8,100) of children live in low income families. Life expectancy for both men and women is lower than the England average.

Life expectancy is 10.2 years lower for men and 9.3 years lower for women in the most deprived areas of St Helens than in the least deprived areas.

A local infographic has been developed to highlight some of the key areas for St Helens and is described as if St Helens is a village of a 100 people

When working with our local community the CCG also use a number of published resources to ensure local needs are met.

Joint Strategic Needs Assessment

JSNA looks into the inequalities between wards using a colour coded matrix. This will highlight the need for further investigation or provision in certain wards to determine the cause for the differences seen.

There is also a detailed look at inequalities in Life Expectancy within the Borough and between St Helens and the national average.

Key Findings

• Life expectancy at birth for men varies by 9 years between wards, while female life expectancy varies by 7 years.
• The greatest cause of the life expectancy gap between St Helens and England is respiratory disease, which causes about a third of excess deaths for both men and women. If respiratory disease mortality was the same rate in St Helens as the national average, life expectancy at birth would increase by 0.5 years for men and 0.6 for women across the whole Borough.
• Mortality due to cardiovascular disease is over two times higher in the most deprived ward compared with the least deprived
• If mortality rates overall in the most deprived areas could be brought down to the levels in the least deprived area, there would be an average of 118 fewer male deaths per year and 93 fewer deaths for women in the most deprived quintile.
• The estimated rate of teenage conceptions (per 1,000 15-17 year olds) varies by Ward across St Helens from approximately zero to three times the national average.

Other key documents include:

NHS ST Helens CCG Equality and Health Inequalities Pack

St Helens Health Profile

St Helens Peoples Plan

Public Health Annual Report 2016 / 2017

Public Health Annual Report 2017 / 2018

Public Health Annual Report 2018 / 2019 - awaiting approval 

Our equality objectives and EDS 2

We are required to prepare and publish equality objectives to meet our specific duty as outlined in the Equality Act 2010. Our plan is specific and measurable and we will update the plan on an annual basis. We have worked collaboratively with our providers on implementing our Equality Delivery Systems (EDS) 2 toolkit. This has resulted in all health services tackling the same barriers and issues that sustain health inequalities in the borough. 

We understand that sometimes in our lives we may face barriers in relation to accessing health services or experience different outcomes. We want to make big differences to health across our diverse communities and our following equality objectives will support us to do this:

• To make fair and transparent commissioning decisions
• To improve access and outcomes for patients and communities who experience disadvantage
• To improve the equality performance of our providers through robust monitoring and collaboration
• To empower and engage our workforce our latest Equality and Diversity Annual Report and Equality objective plan was published and approved by our Governing Body in March 2019 
• To help us set our equality objectives we used the EDS 2 self-assessment

Find out more information

To find out more information about equality and diversity please visit our equality and diversity section