Living and ageing well - what we’ve delivered 2023 to 2025

Enabling people to live healthy, happy and fulfilling lives

In August 2023 we launched the Age and Dementia Friendly Business Recognition Scheme with a toolkit that supports organisations to take simple steps to become more inclusive and accessible to people with dementia. We continued to fund the Ageing Well Service 50+, offering information and advice, befriending, group and one-to-one activity, as well as volunteering opportunities and health promotion for older people. Last year the service supported 4,466 service users. Last year, 480 referrals were made from our seniors housing schemes to help residents maintain their health, safety and wellbeing.

Each autumn we deliver the two week Ageing Well Festival with over 4,000 people attending 149 events at 58 venues across the city in 2024. We also deliver a two-week summer TAKEPART Festival, offering around 4,000 people of all ages an opportunity to take part in community sport, dance, exercise, and physical activity. We worked with 24 community dance groups to create Dance Active, Brighton & Hove's key celebratory intergenerational dance events involving 210 participants from ages 7 to 77.

We have increased access to community mental health support for adults with mental health and wellbeing needs through the UOK service, delivered by a network of local community and voluntary sector partners. We have also increased access to structured treatment for people experiencing harm from drug and alcohol use. The service has supported over 2,770 adults to access treatment.

We jointly commissioned the Trust for Developing Communities and the Hangleton and Knoll Project to deliver the Community Health Inequalities Programme (CHIP) to work with communities in the most deprived areas in the city to reduce barriers to and increase residents’ confidence and uptake of health and well-being services. In 2023/24 this programme had over 8000 attendees at health events across the city with 770 health checks, 987 clinical referrals and 2,168 prevention referrals.

We commission the Sussex Community Foundation Trust Oral Health Promotion team who last year provided over 62 different sessions on oral health in a variety of settings, they also provided support for toothbrushing at breakfast clubs, training for nursery staff and information for parents and carers on toothbrushing. The team also worked with older and vulnerable residents with poorer oral health including providing bespoke advice, including a mobile service for Gypsy, Roma and Travellers groups, people experiencing homelessness and refugees and asylum seekers.

We have provided an agile response to threats to health for our residents, for example the roll out of the Mpox vaccination programme to higher risk people.

Providing joined up services to ensure everyone has access to the information, advice and services they need

We have developed an online self-service Adult Social Care Hub to make it easier for people to find information and advice about support options. We reviewed and developed council web pages on Adult Social Care to improve customer experience and give key information at the earliest stage. We also reviewed phonelines and referral pathways to help direct customers to the right service at the first available opportunity.

We now have an Easy Read Information Hub on the council website to make information more easily accessible for people with learning disabilities. We also added British Sign Language resources to our website to support those who have hearing loss to access information about our services.

We helped 2,046 older people to link in with services and activities via the Ageing Well service single point of contact. Our seniors housing schemes have offered residents a range of activities and events to keep well and maintain social connectivity.

Some 4,231 people have accessed local health and wellbeing advice and services for stopping smoking, reducing alcohol intake, losing weight or becoming more active through our Healthy Lifestyles Team and the Let’s Get Moving programme. We are proud to be one of the most active cities in the country. We also improved services and support available through our partnership with the Hangleton and Knoll Project, including developing skills and confidence in local people to access support.

Ensuring there is safe, effective, sustainable and high-quality health and care provision in the city

We have worked to prevent lengthy hospital stays by supporting people with complex needs through the work of the new Admission Preventions team, freeing up much needed A&E bed space in the Royal Sussex County Hospital. We also delivered a ‘Stay Strong, Steady, and Independent’ campaign, working with over 20 partners and offering over 140 free activities and training courses to improve people’s strength and balance and reduce the risk of falls. In collaboration with NHS Sussex and our community health partners in the Integrated Care Partnership we have delivered the first phase of the new Integrated Community Teams and our Multiple Compound Needs service transformation programme.

We worked in partnership with Healthwatch to deliver the Homecare Checks service, regularly visiting and interviewing people in the city who receive homecare services, to ensure the quality of services are monitored and supporting people’s wellbeing. We also supported providers in the city to provide good quality and safe care with support from our Quality Monitoring Team.

We improved the response times for people who need equipment delivered by Community Equipment Service to ensure safety and support wellbeing. We also led the development of a new multi-agency risk management framework supported by the Safeguarding Adults Board. The new framework strengthens partnership working across the city to support people experiencing multiple disadvantage and risk of harm.

We introduced a new requirement for our care providers to sign up to the Skills for Care LGBTQ+ Learning Framework. We extended funding for an accommodation service to support people returning to the community from mental health hospitals.

We have launched a new assessment & commissioning tool to use in partnership with local providers. The tool will support improved quality assurance and contract monitoring, as well as supporting providers to identify improvement actions for their services.