Healthier and fairer programme

The Healthier and Fairer programme, now in its second decade, focuses on approaches that will have the greatest impact on health outcomes, improve the overall health of the communities we serve and narrow the gap in healthy life expectancy between our most deprived and most affluent communities.

The gap between healthy life expectancy and major illness free life expectancy for the most deprived communities in the North East and North Cumbria is 12 years. This suggests that people living within these communities are living on average 12 years more in self-reported poor health before being clinically identified as having major-illness. Within the least deprived communities, this gap is only three years.

The life expectancy gap between the most deprived and most affluent communities is 9.5 years for women, and 11.8 years for men. 

• To use the best evidence and data to inform a population health approach for action across all aspects of the ICS including finance, risk, quality, and safety.
• To provide advice and input to the development of our Integrated Care Strategy. 
• To build on existing Joint Strategic Needs Assessments and Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategies to identify common themes which would benefit from action at an ICS level.
• To promote the engagement of people and communities to describe their own needs and lead their own health transformation.
• To strengthen links with the Applied Research Collaborative to embed a research and evaluative approach to the interventions we invest in.
• To develop our workforce so that they can all can make a difference to reducing health inequalities and improving population health outcomes.