Population Health

At East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT), we are committed to providing excellent clinical care and to improving the health and wellbeing of the communities we serve in Bedfordshire, Luton, and East London. This commitment underpins our mission to improve the quality of life for all we serve.

For our communities to be healthy and thriving, we need the right building blocks for health in place: stable jobs, fair pay, good quality housing and education. These building blocks are sometimes called the ‘determinants of health’, and they can often have a bigger influence on our health than healthcare services.

ELFT aims to work to ensure the right building blocks are in place to improve health and stop lives being cut short in our communities. Improving population health is central to ELFT’s strategy:

ELFT Strategy

Programmes from tackling racism to financial advice and support for service users are included in a first annual population health report produced by the Trust.

OHID Fingertips – Fingertips is a large public health data collection themed into different health profiles: https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/

Office of National Statistics – the Health and Social Care page includes information on life expectancy, health inequalities, disability and addiction as well as access to and expenditure on private and public healthcare systems.

A Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) is a systematic assessment of the health, care and wellbeing needs of the community, which local authorities have a statutory duty to produce. It is used to inform strategic priorities, as well as future service planning and commissioning. Check your local authority’s website for their most recent JSNA.

At ELFT, there is a range of training and support available to increase the capability and confidence of our teams and service users to improve population health and address health inequalities.
ELFT population health training resources:

Pursuing Equity QI programme: In response to the trust strategy to improve the quality of life for all we serve, the trust has launched a QI programme on Pursuing Equity, designed in partnership with colleagues from public health, people participation, the trust’s networks and the QI department. The programme is supporting over 30 teams across the trust those wanting to use Quality Improvement methodology to tackle an aspect of equity in their area of work. You can find out more about the programme here: https://qi.elft.nhs.uk/collection/pursuing-equity/

ELFT Lead programme: There is a population health module in the ELFT Lead programme, a leadership development course for staff, typically in Band 5-7 roles. The population health module aims to increase participants’ understanding of the different populations and communities that ELFT works in and the causes of poor health within them, of ways to describe populations and their health including inequalities, and how as a leader you can support your teams to think about improving the health of local populations. You can find out more about the ELFT Lead programme, and how to apply here.

Inequalities Webinar Series: We have produced a range of webinars with experts and health practitioners on different topics related to addressing health inequalities and improving population health since 2020. The Inequalities webinars are available here

External population health training resources:
E-learning for Healthcare (e-lfh) platform has a range of free online courses on population health themes, for instance:

Health Inequalities course 
Population Health Management course
NHSE Population Health Management Academy
The Fairhealth website, endorsed by the NHS as "an award-winning collection of educational resources to support health equity”

Marmot M, Goldblatt P, Allen J et al. (2010). Fair Society, Healthy Lives: The Marmot Review. London: Institute of Health Equity.
Reed S, Göpfert A, Wood S, Allwood D, Warburton W. (2019). Building healthier communities: the role of the NHS as an anchor institution. London: The Health Foundation

Being a Marmot Trust

To achieve our strategic ambition of improved population health, ELFT is working with the UCL Institute of Health Equity to become the first NHS ‘Marmot Trust’,

Anchor programme

To date, the focus of the anchor programme at ELFT has been on embedding these social values into procurement.