To ask the Health and Wellbeing Board to approve and endorse the recommendation in the report.

Rob Davies (Consultant in Public Health) presented a brief overview of the JSNA Review. The principal points included:

1.     The purpose of the review was to assess whether the current JSNA process was fit for purpose after a number of years rolling with changes at the local authority level, NHS and the Covid pandemic.

2.     This would help reveal key strengths and weaknesses of the process and make recommendations to improve next year and beyond.

3.     This included looking at website hits and subscriber feedback online in addition to speaking to sixty people. All of this helped generate over 300 unique lines of feedback that were reviewed and summarised.

4.     Furthermore, there was a search of best practice examples and frameworks from national sources and JSNAs were looked at from other areas in and outside of the West Midlands.

5.     In terms of the strengths, it was found that Herefordshire’s JSNA was clearly informing some work in a light touch manner but was driving far less.

6.     Where it is driving change, this is in the form of bespoke needs assessments driven by multi-agency groups.

7.     Some of the weaknesses relative to best practice were around the joint element of the joint needs assessment.

8.     In terms of opportunities, from best practice and looking at other examples, there are a number of opportunities to improve things.

9.     The main opportunity is to define a partnership group which can work through those best practice options and make those decisions on behalf of the JSNA users themselves.

Stephen Brewster (VCS representative) asked if PCN work is informed by the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment or whether that is from other datasets.

Rob Davies responded that the JSNA is a collect-all term and that PCN leaders do use some of the data and information from the JSNA, in addition to supplementing with their own records.

Matt Pearce (Director of Public Health) noted it was a good piece of work and that going forward, system partners need to come together to bring datasets together to help inform work.

David Mehaffey (Executive Director of Strategy and Integration) added that work was being done on population health management to look at how datasets are joined up including primary care data, hospital dataset, and other sources of information. It is important that the information is joined up to help decision-makers make decisions.

Kevin Crompton (Chair of Herefordshire Safeguarding Adults Board) commented that there is a need to get a multi-agency group together to help bring multi-agency data together to use as evidence to try to inform policy, to assess performance and service delivery.

Alan Dawson noted that in his role he uses the JSNA a lot for planning services and use it consistently over time.

Stephen Brewster asked if a VCS representative was wanted to be part of a multi-agency group moving forward.

Rob Davies responded that the recommendation is that it falls within One Herefordshire Partnership and that it would be for the group to incorporate who they want to be involved.

Christine Price (Chief Officer, Healthwatch) noted that with the JSNA in the past they have gone out to seek wider views from the voluntary community sector to help inform broad discussion.

Stephen Brewster added that there needs to be a consistent way of reporting and if there is an opportunity to consult with the VCS it would help drive the work in the long-term.

The Director of Public Health agreed that there would be a lot of work that would involve the VCS as part of a whole range of stakeholders.

The report recommendations were proposed, seconded, and approved unanimously.

Resolved that:

a. Establish a JSNA steering group to respond to the findings of this review;

b. Maintain a JSNA steering group to make on-going partnership decisions on the form, function, administration and governance of the JSNA;

c. Incorporate the function of a JSNA steering group into One Herefordshire Partnership, with the ability to involve additional partners as needed.