Joint Strategic Needs Assessment
The Gateshead Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) is being developed by the Council and the Primary Care Trust as a tool to help our service commissioning to be effective. It ensures that all stakeholders are able to see the data that lies behind our understanding of local priorities and issues, and contribute their own views. This process is still under way. The JSNA must be considered alongside the Directors of Public Health Annual Report, the Overview and Scrutiny Committee Review of Inequalities and the Children and Young People's Plan 2007. The recommendations from all of these are critical to our work to tackle the determinants of ill health and to reduce inequalities in health throughout the life course of people in Gateshead.
The emerging issues have been assessed in terms of their impact: death, years of life lost, hospital admissions, employability implications; and outcomes: prevalence, trends, inequalities, and effective interventions. The issues themselves are: mental health/emotional wellbeing; reducing isolation and loneliness in older people; dementia; people with learning disabilities and cancer screening; circulatory diseases/stroke; alcohol; sexual health; musculoskeletal conditions; respiratory conditions; victims of violence; the health of ex-prisoners.
User, carer and provider views have been included. At the same time, work is taking place with finance managers and commissioners to understand how we can begin to shift resources from acute care towards community services and prevention.