Agenda and draft minutes

Members are asked to declare any disclosable pecuniary or affected interests in respect of any matter to be considered at this meeting.

Any Member with a Disclosable Pecuniary Interest in a matter should withdraw from the meeting when the matter is under consideration and should notify the Democratic Services Officer in attendance that they are withdrawing as they have such an interest. If the Disclosable Pecuniary Interest is not entered on the register of Members interests the Monitoring Officer must be notified of the interest within 28 days.

Any Member with an affected Interest in a matter must disclose the interest to the meeting.  There is no requirement to withdraw from the meeting when the interest is only an affected interest, but the Monitoring Officer should be notified of the interest, if not previously notified of it, within 28 days of the meeting.

There were no declarations of interest.

There were no Urgent Items of Business.

To approve as a correct record the minutes of the meeting of the Board held on 7 December 2023.

The minutes of the meeting held on 7 December 2023 were approved as a correct record.

It was agreed that the new ICB structure would come to the next Board meeting for discussion.

QUESTIONS: If you would like to ask a question you must arrive 15 minutes before the start of the meeting to provide the clerk with your name, address and the question you would like to ask. Alternatively, you can provide this information by email to the clerk at committee@bracknell-forest.gov.uk at least two hours ahead of a meeting. The subject matter of questions must relate to an item on the Board’s agenda for that particular meeting. The clerk can provide advice on this where requested.

PETITIONS: A petition must be submitted a minimum of seven working days before a Board meeting and must be given to the clerk by this deadline. There must be a minimum of ten signatures for a petition to be submitted to the Board. The subject matter of a petition must be about something that is within the Board’s responsibilities. This includes matters of interest to the Board as a key stakeholder in improving the health and wellbeing of communities.

The Board received a question from a member of the public, Alan Thomson, as below:

“A project to evaluate the Bracknell Forest Health and Well-Being Physical Activity Service has been carried out over the previous year, and a report with detailed findings and recommendations is due by End March.

Can follow up be scheduled to apply these findings,  to work out practical actions and involving co-production,  and with the aim to get more people using the existing services?

Note the existing Health and Well-Being Physical Activity Services have capacity for more use, and getting  more people using  them links in with wider objectives on health, ageing well and keeping active.

Note this evaluation was commissioned by Bracknell Forest and carried out by an external team in  PHIRST South Bank, which is one of six Public Health evaluation centres funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).”

Heema Shukla, Deputy Director: Public Health answered the question, and explained that while Bracknell Forest Council funded the health and wellbeing coach for the project, Everyone Active funded all other project expenses. It was also clarified that the Council had put in a bid for PHIRST to evaluate the project, and the evaluation had been funded by the NIHR.

The outcome report had been received by officers and was scheduled to be reviewed by the Bracknell Forest Physical Activity Network which included lots of stakeholders. The network would assess the report and update its action plan to address any identified gaps. Once this work was complete, the report would come to the Health and Wellbeing Board as part of the Health and Wellbeing Strategy refresh in September 2024.

As a supplementary question, Mr Thomson asked how interested individuals could be involved in the work and provide insight and knowledge?

It was noted that Mr Thomson had met with officers offline to discuss how services run by Everyone Active could be improved, and that service users would be engaged to discuss how to increase participation and usage of Everyone Active’s services at Bracknell Leisure Centre.

To monitor delivery of the Health & Wellbeing Strategy.

Heema Shukla updated Board members on Priority 5: Improve years lived with good health and happiness, with a focus on obesity and tobacco control work.

A system-wide approach had been taken to both areas of work, to support people who exhibited these behaviours to change their lifestyle. A whole-school approach to weight management was being used in schools also.

Officers involved in the tobacco control work aimed to broaden the smoking cessation service to include vapes or other tobacco use, using funding from the Department for Health and Social Care. A pilot was planned to support young people who used vapes and wanted to stop.

It was noted that hospitals were not able to prescribe oxygen support at home unless patients gave up vaping. The ICB were running a text messaging pilot to use connected care services to contact people who smoke to refer them to cessation services.

With regard to obesity services, the Board were asked to approve the next steps which could be funded by the public health grant.

Tanvi Barreto, Senior Public Health Strategist attended the meeting to speak on work to tackle obesity.

Work to address obesity included strategic level work as well as weight management programmes. The Council was developing a whole system approach to tackle obesity in collaboration with the University of Southampton. The first stage of this work was stakeholder mapping and the creation of a joint steering group, the second stage was stakeholder engagement, the third phase was to agree four strategic actions for Bracknell Forest and the fourth phase was to develop an action plan to take forward.

The actions had been agreed as follows:

·        The first action was to map the food environment of Bracknell Forest including any fast food outlets and other data including proximity to schools.

·        The second action was around enabling healthier diets, to work with local chefs to develop digital resources to share the weight loss journey.

·        The third action was to create a network of weight loss champions.

·        The fourth action was to work with supermarkets and shops locally to influence how food is displayed.

Weight management programmes also continued to run locally, including a children and young people specific group. There had been concern around referrals to the children and young people group, as frontline workers were not confident to raise issues around weight with families. A new approach had been taken through schools, including a 6-week programme on healthy diet and healthy lunchboxes, workshops with parents and staff, and both universal and targeted physical activity programmes.

The work was all being brought together into the community map which residents and professionals could access. 

In response to questions, the following points were noted:

·        The programme had targets such as the number of people achieving 5% body weight loss. It had proven challenging to get the right data in place with the provider, and officers were working to improve this. Overall wellbeing was measured through the programmes also, which was showing improvement. People were also  ...  view the full minutes text for item 38.

The Vape / Tobacco Alliance Group work was covered under a previous agenda item.

Heema Shukla presented the Pan-Berkshire Suicide Prevention Strategy.

The strategy had been developed on a pan-Berkshire basis to address gaps in service provision across the county. A national strategy had also been released. It was recognised that no single body could address suicide prevention, and each Berkshire Health and Wellbeing Board was responsible for mapping the strategy to their local approaches.

The contract with Empower (?) had been extended to provide support to the bereaved across the three Berkshire local authorities on the Frimley footprint. Surrey and Hampshire used their own bereavement services.

Board members attention was drawn to the fact that Thames Valley Police had not extended their funding for a bereavement support practitioner post, which had offered a point of contact for bereaved families to support with signposting.

Action groups were formed on a local, East Berkshire and pan-Berkshire basis, to give better governance of the actions.

In response to questions, the following points were noted:

·        It was known that children transitioning to adulthood were a key risk group, and the age of young people covered 0-25 rather than 0-19.

·        It was noted that people affected by domestic violence were more likely to attempt suicide. Sophie Wing-King, Bracknell Forest’s Domestic Abuse Strategic Lead sat on the Berkshire Suicide Prevention group to highlight this risk and provide insight into domestic abuse suicide cases. It was suggested that the link between domestic abuse and suicide prevention work should be more clearly highlighted in the action plan. (Action: Heema Shukla)

·        The work to support families bereaved by suicide was currently funded from ringfenced suicide prevention funding.

·        Individual organisations were looking to improve their own bereavement support for staff, but also wellbeing service for staff. In Bracknell Forest, work was ongoing to put support in place for staff who dealt with families affected by suicide. It was noted that there was a significant wider support network in Berkshire.

·        Bracknell Forest Council had committed capital funding to invest in suicide prevention work around the town centre. It was commented that the suicide prevention strategy would help agencies to coalesce around the work, and to work together to support suicide prevention work.

Board members supported the recommendations.

There were no Agency Updates.

To consider the following motion:

That pursuant to Section 100A of the Local Government Act 1972, as amended, and having regard to the public interest, members of the public and press be excluded from the meeting for the consideration of the following item which involves the likely disclosure of exempt information under the following category of Schedule 12A of that Act:

(3)  Information relating to the financial and business affairs of any particular   person - including the authority holding that information.

RESOLVED that pursuant to Section 100A of the Local Government Act 1972, as amended, and having regard to the public interest, members of the public and press be excluded from the meeting for the consideration of the following item which involves the likely disclosure of exempt information under the following category of Schedule 12A of that Act:

(1)        Information relating to any individual  (Item 12).

The Board received the Domestic Abuse Annual Report, and Sophie Wing-King drew Board members’ attention to a few key areas of the report including training, Berkshire Women’s Aid work, and work on the Safe Accommodation scheme.