Health study focusing on 85 Hartlepool streets as hospital chief says town is facing drug and alcohol-related admissions epidemic

Hartlepool Health and Wellbeing Board agreed to the development of the new place-based approach to run parallel to its ongoing usual work.

The plan will focus on 85 streets in the Victoria ward, which had been selected as an area for targeted work by the council children’s services department.

The aim of the exercise is to identify key areas of demand, key issues, and locating those experiencing these issues, such as where ‘frequent flyers’ at A&E are from.

Deepak Dwarakanath, representative from North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust, endorsed the strategy, adding the town in general suffers from issues such as drug and alcohol use which this could help address.

He said: “From the acute providers point of view we’re in the middle of an epidemic, probably the best way to put it, of drug and alcohol-related admissions.

“If you look at any of the outcome tables, this area does very poorly with drug-related deaths.

“I suspect if you look at those 85 streets there will also be streets where there has been the least uptake of health screenings which is obviously the way to prevent illnesses of the future.”

Representative from Cleveland Police, Superintendent Sharon Cooney backed the move and said it ties in with the increase in neighbourhood police in the town.

She said: “From a policing perspective I think that’s awesome.

“We’re just standing up our neighbourhood policing teams again and I would be absolutely supportive of that, it’s what we need to do.

“If you want to prevent things in 10 years time this is where we need to be. What we don’t want to be doing is by the time we’re there, it’s too late.”

The plans were announced by council director of public health Pat Riordan, and came following a Health and Wellbeing Board workshop in November.

She said: “It’s part of an overall goal, we felt that was the right approach in terms of neighbourhoods and we felt that was the right neighbourhood to focus on.

“We’ll still be doing things universally, don’t run away from that fact the other wards will receive attention, of course they will.

“It’s developing a neighbourhood approach in order to see what we can learn, and hopefully learn early lessons about what works and roll that out.”

A partnership group of senior leaders will also be set up as part of the work to oversee the implementation of the strategy.

Coun Shane Moore, council leader, stressed it was important all partners lived up to their commitments and feed in information when required.