SPH carried out a Health Needs Assessment (HNA) for a local authority that was recommissioning its Healthy Child Programme (HCP). The purpose was to review whether existing provision and service configuration of the HCP was meeting the needs of children and young people in the county, and to identify gaps and potential options for improvement.
The HCP is a preventative programme including multiple teams and agencies across the local authority, including Health Visiting and School Nursing Services, the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) Programme, linking with childhood immunisation services, the community paediatrics team, the speech and language service, services for children with a learning disability and complex needs and child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), among others.
The HNA was carried out jointly by SPH and the local authority, with the epidemiological needs assessment and service description provided by the local authority. The report was compiled using a range of publicly available and locally collected epidemiological and service use data. SPH carried out a consultation of key corporate stakeholders as well as children and young people, their parents and carers. This included semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders in a range of organisations, a survey of a wider range of staff who work with children and young people and a survey of children and young people, their parents and carers which was distributed through the services.
The response to the stakeholder engagement was very good. Rich qualitative data from this engagement complemented the quantitative data to inform the service specification for the recommissioning of these important services.
