Body name: Health Wellbeing Boards (HWBs)
Place in the wiring: Local/Place Level
Body-stated function: HWBs remain a formal statutory committee of the local authority and will continue to provide a forum for political, clinical, professional, and community leaders from across the health and care system to come together to improve the health and well-being of their local population and reduce health inequalities.
Their budget: “HWBs do not commission health services themselves and do not have a budget but play an important role in informing the allocation of local resources.”
Patient/societal benefit from the function: the HWB website provides a series of case studies that illustrate real examples of improvement delivery. One example is improving MMR vaccination rates in communities with lower uptake in Cheshire West and Chester, the most vulnerable communities. Elsewhere on the HWB website, you can find strange words like “strategic,” “needs assessment,” and “local government.”
Number of staff: Little information is available on the number of staff or their costs. We found jobs recruiting a manager and a team structure that includes a data analyst, and we assume there will be some administrative and meeting costs.
There are 152 Health and Wellbeing Boards in England. TTE estimates that a wellbeing board will cost around 250k a year to administer, giving the NHS a total cost of £38 million.
The Health and Social Care Act 2012 sets out a minimum membership of:
One local councillor
A representative of the local Healthwatch
A representative of the local clinical commissioning group (the ICB)
The local authority director for adult social services
The local authority director for children’s services
The director of public health for the local authority
Grey areas: none that we can see.
Recommendations or comments: HWBs develop five-year plans with their local NHS trusts and Integrated Care Boards. Because of their local bottom-up collegiate approach and the needs assessment ethos, they are likely to deliver very good returns to the taxpayers. We commend the documentation of the various cases in which real benefits have either been achieved or sought.
Two old geezer taxpayers wrote this post. They are biased in favour of anything that is bottom-up.
Bottom up health care is absolutely the right way. If you are trying to prevent illness and injury in everyone then you are treating and caring for no one. It is a way of taking your eye off the ball, as it were.
So I am a bit concerned that the function of these Health Wellbeing Boards may be hobbled by the Department of Health and Social Care.
It's just that, in my experience, the central government is not good at empowering local authorities to decide how resources are allocated, and that new initiatives often originate in London and then percolate down to the provinces.
My fear is that Health and Wellbeing Boards will turn out to be an expensive talking shop to allow local politicians, and their officials, to feel ‘involved’.
For instance, I think it's true that NHS England used evidence collected by Healthwatch (and others) to justify their Primary Care Recovery Plan, which it will expect Integrated Care Boards to implement (with the cooperation, of course, with Health Wellbeing Boards).
It's a very unwieldy and expensive system which, I fear, is designed to protect the Minister and their officials from criticism.