Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Health and Wellbeing Strategy Consultation 2015-18
- Every child has the best start in life
- A reduced gap in life expectancy
- Improved mental health and wellbeing
The time is now right for us to review progress and consider where we go from here. Over the past 6 months, workshops, surveys and meetings have been held through HealthWatch, HAVCO and Public Health, reviewing where we are now, what has worked and what needs to change. Using these findings, a draft strategy for the next three years has been devised.
Haringey's Health and Wellbeing Board would welcome your views on the three priorities that came out of the feedback from the review. We are interested in how individuals, organisations and services can participate and help with making an impacting on the priorities. The future Health and Wellbeing Strategy will continue to emphasise the importance of partnership working and joint commissioning to achieve a focused use of resources and better value for money. Activities need to incorporate prevention and early intervention, build community resilience and citizen empowerment, and reduce inequalities.
Please give us your views
Please give us your views as they will be used to help finalise the strategy and in the accompanying action plan.
Once you have viewed the draft health and wellbeing strategy and the attached documents, please take part in our survey:
http://www.haringey.gov.uk/social-care-and-health/health/health-and...
Closing date
Please let us know your views by 30 March 2015, 5pm.
The aim is to publish the revised strategy by mid 2015.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Is there any actual progress? How much of it will be wiped out or reversed by the current planned budget cuts?
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Permalink Reply by Peter on
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Hi Alan,
its funny you ask this as i have emailed the council to ask the exact same thing. when i get a response ill let you know. its quite important i think so i hope most of the proposals remain.
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Forgive me Peter, if I'm cynical. But I had sixteen years of Haringey senior officers telling me that things were getting better. Sometimes it was actually true. But more often it was not.
The three bullet points you quoted from the last Strategy did not appear to me to be anything of the kind. It was at best a set of desirable goals. But in no sense a Plan which set out how to achieve those goals.
In some cases statements set out weren't goals at all, but aspirations of such generality and vacuousness that no sensible person could possibly disagree.
In other words, examples of the Law of the Nonsensical Negative - when the opposite of what's said is clearly nonsense.
So, would anyone not in their right mind not want: "Every child to have the best start in life?" Would anyone oppose : "all children realising their full potential?" Or deny them "a network of support that will enable them to live independent and healthy lives" ?
And so on, with the other "over-arching" aims.
Take for example: "Improved Mental Health and Wellbeing". Does anyone object if: "all residents enjoy the best possible mental health and wellbeing and have a good quality of life".
Even Ebenezer Scrooge could have agreed. Although being an enthusiastic Malthusian thinker, he'd have considered it unlikely.
Yet to be honest, there are those who are working extremely hard to prevent people having: "A greater ability to manage their own lives, stronger social relationships, a greater sense of purpose, the skills they need for living and working, improved chances in education, better employment rates and a suitable and stable place to live."
These contrarians are called Property Developers, "Cabinet" councillors; and Haringey Planners. They are beavering away like mad scientists in some tenth-rate nineteen fifties sci-fi film. Playing out Sim City fantasies of demolition, planning blight; social cleansing and dislocation of family life. They'd like to knock down thousands of homes across the borough. In some cases to build up to 25 storey towers. They propose a vast social experiment to stamp out poverty by removing the poor and destroying their homes and businesses. No prob. Let them eat artisanal loaves.
Though the 1970s I was a social worker in Brent. We had Annual reports of the Medical Officer of Health which used to highlight - strongly and with calls for action - many of the same recurring problems. Years later as a councillor I used to get invitations to conferences on poverty, health, homelessness and other social issues. I didn't go because the costs were astronomical and it seemed the more disadvantaged the group being talked about and reported on, the plusher and posher the setting.
I'm not saying that valuable and even pathbreaking work hasn't been done in Haringey on health issues. Clearly it has. But I wonder about the value of "high-level" "over-arching" strategic stuff.
Here's Charlotte Pell's perfect summary of what's going on when policy officers, senior staff and councillors puffed up with their own status are working on "strategic"; and forget the people who live under their arch.
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Thanks for this Alan!
I completely agree with your views, being a social worker in the 70s its interesting to get your views on this.
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Thank you, Peter, for introducing the topic.
Did you have time to look at the Charlotte Pell link? I think she's great.
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