County Durham Joint Strategic Needs Assessment
The County Durham Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) provides a detailed overview of the current and future health and wellbeing needs of the people of County Durham.
To help achieve positive outcomes for the local population, the County Durham JSNA aims to:
- highlight areas where there is a need to improve health and wellbeing outcomes for the local community
- aid decision makers in targeting resources to both areas and services
- act as a resource document to support health and wellbeing planning and commissioning
- help inform our plans and strategies to provide a basis upon which to plan for the achievement of local outcomes and targets
Related links:
Director of Public Health Reports
Who is responsible for the JSNA?
The Health and Social Care Act 2012 places clear duties on local authorities and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to prepare a JSNA and a Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy (which will influence commissioning strategies for health and social care) to be discharged through the Health and Wellbeing Board.
What does the JSNA look like?
The JSNA combines a key dataset, which shows how an area compares with others across a wide range of indicators related to health and wellbeing, with a small number of chapters on key topic areas.
How are the key topics selected for the needs assessments?
The key topics are decided by the health and wellbeing board based on recommendations from the JSNA steering group. Stakeholders and partners in the local authority, the health service, the voluntary and community sector and members of the public, are invited to propose topics which are prioritised against a range of criteria.
Who carries out the needs assessments?
The needs assessments are led by subject leads and public health specialists working in partnership with contributions from a range of people with experience in the particular topic area.
What happens to the recommendations of the JSNA?
Each topic based JSNA chapter is sent to local health and social care commissioners. They are asked to make an initial response to the recommendations. Commissioning plans and strategies can be informed by JSNA chapter. Commissioners use the needs assessment to help them make judgements about where to prioritise limited resources. It may not be possible to take forward all the recommendations made in a JSNA chapter, but the information is critical for their decision making processes. JSNA chapters also make recommendations for service providers. Whilst providers are not formally asked to respond, they are sent the recommendations and asked to take them into consideration.
The JSNA uses these webpages to publish its reports.