Report highlights how life expectancy at the Scarborough end of the A170 is ten years less than at the Hambleton end.
A multi-agency group has agreed to develop a fresh five-year health and wellbeing ambition for North Yorkshire, partly to respond to the wide-ranging impacts on the county’s 618,000 residents of the Covid pandemic and the cost of living crisis.
Louise Wallace, the county’s director of public health, told a meeting of the county’s Health and Wellbeing Board it was hoped to launch the strategy by next year to accelerate action over health inequalities in different areas of the expansive county that had been exacerbated since the last masterplan ended in 2020.
The move follows the director of public health’s annual report stating how the pandemic had exposed and amplified underlying inequalities in society and highlighting how at one end of the A170 in Hambleton district male and female life expectancy was some ten and nine years, respectively, higher than in Scarborough.
The report stated how health impacts of the pandemic, other than those from having Covid itself, include, increased alcohol intake, increased obesity rates, worsening mental health, physical de-conditioning, reduced physical activity.
It stated indirect impacts included routing access to healthcare and longer waiting lists, while six million “missing patients”, did not seek treatment in 2020.
Louise Wallace told the meeting, which included North Yorkshire Police’s chief constable, leading council and NHS figures, that public health in the county was “generally quite well and along with the England average for most things”, but there were inequalities in some area that needed to be addressed as part of the new strategy’s overarching ambition.
Louise said the frontline health challenges included improving residents’ quality of life in an area with a larger than average proportion of elderly people, tackling obesity and smoking, against a backdrop of a “pretty challenging financial situation”.
She said the biggest challenges the county faced included learning to live with Covid, cost of living pressures and health system changes and that the strategy would seek to tackle the county’s stagnating healthy life expectancy.
The Director told the meeting:
“It’s about how we use our resources to best effect between us. Of course, we can do none of this, I don’t believe, unless we do it in partnership and do it well together.”
Louise Wallace said the strategy would focus on helping the most deprived members of North Yorkshire’s population, featuring prioritised issues so the board could hold itself to account “and actually deliver some changes that impact on people living in communities”.
Louise said:
“We want to make sure the whole of the population across North Yorkshire has an equal or a good opportunities to live healthy and active lives.”
The meeting was told there was a compelling case for investing in primary and secondary preventative measures, particularly as it determined the availability of the workforce.
The Director added:
“Of course why we have a health and wellbeing board and partners is because we are probably better and stronger together when we focus on issues and can collaborate.”
The strategy is set to be launched next October, following a public consultation in the spring.
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