Joint Strategic Needs Assessment
Guide to sections
- Summary document
- Factsheets by life-course
- Pre-birth and early years
- Children and young people
- Early adulthood
- Middle age
- Old age
- Cross-cutting
- Background documents
An overview of health and wellbeing in Tower Hamlets
The Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) is a process through which the council's social care services (Education, Social Care and Wellbeing) work together with public health and NHS services to assess the needs of the Tower Hamlets population and determine priorities for commissioning services.
As described in the Statutory Guidance on Joint Strategic Needs Assessments and Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategies 2012, the Health and Wellbeing Board brings together key NHS, public health and social care leaders in Tower Hamlets to work in partnership to establish a shared local view on the needs of the local community and support joint commissioning of NHS, social care and public health services.
The Health and Wellbeing Board develops joint health and wellbeing strategies based on the assessment of needs outlined in the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment. This joint approach to needs assessment will continue to enable an increasingly integrated approach to health and social care commissioning and provision, with many benefits to service users, patients and carers, not least a more seamless experience of health and social care services.
The JSNA attempts to answer questions such as:
- what does health and wellbeing in Tower Hamlets look like?
- what should we be doing?
- what are we doing?
- what can we do better?
- what more do we need to know?
Understanding residents’ needs is crucial to reducing health inequalities and improving health and wellbeing for the population of Tower Hamlets. The JSNA highlights some key strategic priorities for improving health, preventing illness and reducing health inequalities. To achieve a healthy and supportive community, our aims are to:
- prevent people from dying prematurely
- help people to live healthier lives
- enable people to live independently
- provide excellent primary and community care
- keep vulnerable children, adults and families safer, minimising harm and neglect.
The JSNA core dataset draws together data on population demographics, disease patterns, the wider determinants of health (such as housing, education, employment, benefits, etc), use of social care, use of primary care (i.e. GPs, pharmacists, dentists, etc.), planned and unplanned secondary care (i.e. hospitals, clinics, etc.), performance trends, spend, public perspectives and the views of professionals.
An overview document is produced each year drawing attention to key facts and figures, and highlighting priority issues for Tower Hamlets. Supporting this, topic-specific factsheets as well as more in-depth reports are produced and updated as new evidence or research is identified, containing links to supporting data, maps and further analysis for those who require more detail.
This rolling programme will enable evidence-based commissioning and highlight gaps and areas for future work. It will also provide timely information to help providers shape their services.
Summary document
Factsheets by life-course
Pre-birth and early years
Children and young people
Early adulthood
Middle age
Old age
Cross-cutting
Background documents
For further information please email jsna@towerhamlets.gov.uk