Recommendations of the Public Health report
- Continue to promote the Breastfeeding Friendly scheme and deliver breastfeeding awareness training to frontline employees. They will promote the benefits of breastfeeding and how everyone in communities can support breastfeeding mothers.
- Use ward level data to target activity to areas with the lowest breastfeeding rates, engaging with communities to identify and overcome barriers.
- Maternity services, health visiting and the stop smoking service should work together to further reduce rates of smoking in pregnancy. Focusing on narrowing the inequalities in smoking rates which exist in Darlington.
- Develop an injury prevention resource on the Making Every Contact Count (MECC) gateway.
- Improve pathways between CDDFT and the 0-19 public health service. This will ensure the flow of information and better support families who experience the hospital admission of a child due to unintentional and deliberate injuries.
- Partners should make the most of the opportunities through the delivery of the Best Start in Life Local Plan and Best Start Family Hub offer to work together in a more integrated way in communities to support families, improve outcomes and reduce inequalities.
- Develop and implement a whole systems approach Healthy Weight Strategy for Darlington. This will use national evidence and local data and intelligence.
- Take action to improve the nutritional content of food in early years and school settings. Also reduce sugar intake of children and young people in Darlington, to support healthy weight and good oral health.
- Work with the planning team to influence the response and decision making on future takeaway applications, maximising opportunities within the refreshed National Planning Policy Framework.
- Act locally to restrict the advertising of food which is high in fat, sugar and salt.
- Continue to raise the profile of the Supervised Toothbrushing Programme. Work towards it being embedded in 100% of early years settings and extended into other year groups if there is an identified need.
- Increase the number of children cleaning their teeth correctly twice daily through a range of communications and oral health interventions.
- Develop an evidence based proposal for a targeted fluoride varnish programme to meet the needs of our community and reduce levels of tooth decay in children.
- Follow up the findings of the self-harm audit and use these to further develop a collaborative, child-centred multiagency approach to mental health and self-harm support.
- Support good mental health by seeking and using children’s and families’ voices in service development and evaluation. Provide shared system-wide learning, particularly in relation to identifying those most vulnerable to self-harm and mental health admission and readmission, and the pathways that they follow
- Continue to develop the partnership approach to increasing rates of childhood vaccination. Focusing on making it easier for families to access vaccinations and reducing the variation in uptake within Darlington.