I am delighted to announce that Humber, Coast and Vale Health and Care Partnership has become the first integrated care system to commit to producing a Levelling Up Impact Report to measure its impact against the UK Government’s Levelling Up Goals.
The Levelling Up Goals, formed in 2020, are chaired by Rt Hon Justine Greening, the UK’s former Secretary of State for Education and International Development. Our commitment to the Levelling Up agenda forms part of our response to Covid-19 through a greater recognition of the need to ‘level up’ across our communities as outlined in our 21/22 strategic objectives.
We know there is a strong correlation between health and deprivation, which sees people from more deprived communities experiencing worse health and shorter life-expectancy on average. The Goals are a practical response to tackling the gap in health between people living in the most deprived and most advantaged areas, which is known to have widened over the last decade and which has significantly worsened as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The NHS hopes to play a key role in Levelling Up as both commissioners and providers of health care, so that it can invest more in prevention and also to target services to directly address inequalities in health outcomes and experience.
We are proud to be the first ICS to make this commitment with a shared vision to improve health, inclusive growth and wellbeing in the Yorkshire and the Humber regions. The key aim is to strive for a level playing field for our people, in life, health and job opportunities.
As a long-term campaigner on social mobility and levelling up, in 2018 Justine Greening co-founded the Social Mobility Pledge to bring organisations together to improve social mobility. The Levelling Up Goals are the first major piece of work launched by the most committed of these organisations, the Purpose Coalition. Greening has described the Levelling Up Goals as being the first levelling up architecture and give a clear benchmark for organisations to measure their impact against, and they will help in our collective aims to tackle inequalities, help recover from the pandemic and to act as a wider catalyst for change.
The Humber, Coast and Vale Health and Care Partnership is delighted to have signed up to this really ambitious piece of work which will assist us in realising our mission to help our people and communities to start life well, live well and age well and to tackle inequalities across our Integrated care system.
For more information about the Levelling Up Goals, please visit www.levellingupgoals.org