Luciana Berger – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2014-06-09.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans he has to ensure that local authorities in England pursue continuous improvement in the proportion of their eligible population being (a) offered and (b) taking up NHS health checks.

Jane Ellison

Public Health England (PHE) has set out a long-term aspiration of achieving an uptake of 75% and encourages areas to offer the NHS Health Check to 20% of the local population each year. In 2014-15, PHE has set a short term ambition of working towards achieving a 66% uptake and offers to 20% of the eligible population.

PHE is developing an improvement offer, tailored to the needs of local areas, to support local action. PHE will also enable local authorities to overcome common issues that affect offers by actively disseminating learning on information governance and data flows.

To support improvement in uptake PHE will work to inform the public’s understanding of the programme. In recent weeks PHE has launched NHS Health Check content on NHS Choices and is planning to extend this by developing a directory of services for England.

Research and evaluation on applying behavioural insights to maximise uptake is also taking place. In the coming months PHE will support a network of local authorities to test and disseminate learning on the approaches that maximise uptake.

The quarterly publication of both offer and uptake data brings transparency to local delivery of the programme. This enables local councillors, Healthwatch and the public to use existing local government mechanisms to scrutinise activity and encourage improvements in both performance and quality.