Public Health Peterborough
We help people to stay healthy and live longer, through avoiding threats to health, and promoting health and wellbeing. We also gather, analyse and study community health data, looking for effective ways to improve the health of our local population.
Local needs
Having a dedicated Public Health Team at Peterborough City Council allows us to better address our city's health needs. For our residents, this means a tailored and effective approach to health. We're committed to improving health for young families, supporting mental health, and reducing health inequalities. Our focus is to build a healthier, resilient community for the future.
We can:
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Understand and address local health issues. We can gain better insights into the health challenges faced by our diverse communities and deal with them.
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Embed Public Health across our services. We can guide services on evidence-based Public Health approaches, leading to better outcomes.
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Address health inequalities. Our richest residents live much longer than the poorest. We aim to close this gap as part of our poverty strategy.
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Influence planning policy. We ensure new developments consider health needs. Creating living environments where residents can thrive.
Across the life course - cross system working
Our goal
Our aim is to help people live healthier, happier, and longer lives - and to reduce unfair differences in health between groups. We can do this by preventing long-term illnesses. These illness affect our ability to work and enjoy life.
The main ones are:
- Cancer
- Cardiovascular disease (strokes and heart attacks)
- Lung disease
- Dementia
- Joint problems
- Mental illness
Behaviours that may cause these illness:
- What we eat and how active we are
- Smoking, drinking or drug use
- How we sleep and manage stress
We have to start early. That’s when lifetime habits are formed. We use most of the Public Health grant that comes from central government to commission services that help people with these. Find out more about the services we have commissioned and how you can access them.
Behaviours can be influenced by wider factors:
- Education and jobs
- How much money we have
- Housing
- Family, friends, and loneliness
- The environment around us (transport, pollution, safety, green spaces, food environment and social media)
Determinants of health and addressing health inequalities
Our homes and what’s around them are important to our health and wellbeing. We are working to support the identification of cold and damp homes that could impact health. We are leading system-wide work to better understand the local need in relation to poverty and health and wellbeing. We use evidence on what works to take action to try to reduce the impacts of poverty or can help reduce financial pressures on individuals and families.
We look at the wider social and economic factors that enable the population to thrive. In our Healthy Places work, we work to change things that help improve people’s heath. These are the wider determinants of health. Visit the Health Foundation’s Building Blocks of Health Toolkit for further information.
This includes working with colleagues and partners to reduce local poverty and health inequalities. Over recent decades there’s evidence of how wealthier people are living longer than those with less money. We look at what we can use in existing strategies and policies. Health inequalities may be worse in deprived areas. Our work includes working with others to increase uptake of childhood immunisations and of services to reduce alcohol-related poor health.
Public Health also comment on some of the planning applications that are made to the Council, including:
- Health requirements
- Noise and air pollution
- Green spaces
- Transport, cycling and pedestrian access
- Local community facilities
Public Health and local government background
Modern local government began because of Public Health. The Industrial Revolution led to overcrowding and disease in the cities. The 1848 Public Health Act established local boards of health and they employed Inspectors of Nuisances to begin to fix the health problems. Those officers are now known as Environmental Health Officers.
Public Health continued to grow and develop and what we now call ‘Public Health’ moved to the NHS. In 2010, the Public Health White Paper, ‘Healthy Lives, Healthy People’, set out to boost local authorities' role. As a result, Public Health returned to local authorities in 2013.