Blog: Making a difference for people in Chesterfield

By Dr Alice Fenton, Clinical Lead for Chesterfield Place Alliance

It is increasingly recognised by partners across Chesterfield that everyone has an equal right to the building blocks of good health, such as stable jobs, good pay, quality housing and good education.

But this isn’t the reality for everyone. In some of our communities in Chesterfield, those building blocks are missing.

Right now, people in our poorest neighbourhoods are dying a decade earlier than people in the wealthiest areas. When we don’t have what we need to heat our homes, buy healthy food and are constantly worrying about making ends meet, it can lead to chronic stress, poor health and lives being cut short.

The NHS is part of a wider system supporting people from cradle to grave. This broader system of support in Derbyshire is called Joined up Care Derbyshire and is aimed at bringing together partner organisations to improve outcomes in population health and tackle these inequalities in outcomes, experience and access. In Chesterfield we do this by working alongside communities and through working in partnership.

We recognise that what we do individually is not enough. We want to explore and build on the strengths of our organisational work with communities so that we collectively bring our head, heart and hands to close this gap. We want to be more than a sum of our parts, sharing information and resources, working together on our plans, understanding the impact of what we do and importantly having a better understanding of how we work with our communities.

A good example of this is in Barrow Hill where we’re working with the community and Barrow Hill Memorial Trust to understand how we might complement their vision for delivering a range of services next year from the renovated Barrow Hill Memorial Hall, a regenerated historic building which has been a centre for health and wellbeing in the village since 1863.  

We will take learning from this work and apply it for the benefit of other parts of Chesterfield. For example, we are learning that the resources and spaces that we have within neighbourhoods are not only important to the local people as a way of connecting people to each other and to local groups, but also as a way in which a range of services can be adapted to local need.

We are currently working with Derbyshire Healthcare Foundation Trust on how their Living Well community mental health offer might be delivered more locally and Chesterfield Royal Hospital have also offered to deliver CPR training to residents so they are able to use the Defibs that have been donated by local residents.

Our two local Primary Care Networks are pooling resources not only to see how we can jointly deliver services to local residents such a social prescribing, but also to start to better use a population health management approach to send targeted messages to patients we know are at highest risk of specific diseases for example to identify people who have high blood pressure.

It’s early days for this work but it will significantly help us to get ahead of the disease curve in the future. 

We have many great partners that are all contributing to this work from local families and community leaders, to the Barrow Hill Memorial Trust and other voluntary and community sector partners, through to NHS, public health and council services and organisations.

Our ambition to be more than a sum of our parts is becoming a reality and we hope this is what will make a difference for the people of Chesterfield.