It was a sobering and humbling experience to learn about the shocking inequalities in children's health during this excellent conference organised by Centre for Population Health chief executive Professor Durka Dougall and her team and sponsored by Sanofi.
Children North East
In a powerful opening address, Leigh Elliott, chief executive Children North East, outlined the stark levels of deprivation in the North where poverty rates range from 35% in Newcastle to 85% in Newport, Middlesborough – the highest ward rate in the UK.
Life expectancy in the North East is 11% lower than wealthy parts of the country with an 18-year disparity between the most and least deprived areas of the region as a direct result of unequal access to healthcare, education and the basic resources that lead to good health.
Elliott revealed that in some of the most deprived parts of the region, individual GPs serve around 1,800 patients, with poorer health leading to worse educational outcomes, fewer job opportunities and a ‘life-cycle of disadvantage that is difficult to break'.
Children North East works with healthcare providers to remove barriers to healthcare among deprived communities, including improving accessibility to services, providing support for families to attend appointments and financial support.
Foetal alcohol spectrum disorder
In the following panel session, Clare Devanney-Glynn, shared her powerful lived experience of adopting three children with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). FASD is a lifelong condition caused by alcohol exposure during pregnancy that results in physical, behavioural and learning disabilities. Average life expectancy is in the mid-30s due to the risk of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, and violent death.
‘I work relentlessly hard with so many different services and universities on change because this cohort of children and young people are clogging up all of our systems in the wrong places, in the wrong way because we are not addressing the condition at the beginning,' Devanney-Glynn said.
Stressing the importance of education, she added: ‘If I had known what I was dealing with in my children when they were babies, they would have had completely different lives now and it would not have cost any money to anyone.'
Neighbourhood health
During an afternoon break-out session, Professor Andy Knox, acting medical director of Lancashire and South Cumbria ICB, and Jill Duffy, reducing inequalities manager at Bradford District and Craven Health and Care Partnership, discussed harnessing the power of neighbourhood working. Duffy shared how Bradford District and Craven had taken a ‘hyper local' approach by developing 13 community partnerships of 30,000-50,000 people and directing most funding to the areas of deepest deprivation.
She explained the importance of using data to identify key needs and enabling local governance and decision-making to make primary and secondary interventions. Duffy revealed the programmes were delivering a future return of £6.62 for every £1 invested today.
Professor Knox demonstrated how Lancashire and South Cumbria ICB had improved engagement by ‘building really radical different relationships with people'.
He shared how building a prayer room in a local hospital for Muslim doctors had resulted in screening rates in the Asian community increasing to match levels in the white community following little initial uptake.
‘Population health and neighbourhood working is not rocket science but it does require us to unlearn and embrace humility and listen at a level that scares us and change the way we work,' Prof Knox observed.
Positive energy
Overall, while there was a palpable sense of anger about the neglect of children in poor communities by central government, there was an even stronger positive energy and infectious enthusiasm to share experience and take inclusive action to improve peoples' lives.
The over-riding feeling as the conference closed was a sense of united purpose to provide hope for a better future for our children.
