Case studies

On Wednesday 10th February, Hertfordshire County Council and other local agencies completed their ‘surge testing’ pilot in the EN10 area of Broxbourne for the new South African variant of COVID-19.

Staff running chair-based exercise classeshave started to use sensors and tablets to assess the falls risk of clients and helpingthem tailor exercise programmes. Theprogramme has been used in care homes andis now being tested in community settings.

Mental health problems can impact anybody at any stage of their life. Many people are scared to open up about mental health issues but Hertfordshire Council and partner agencies from across the county made it their mission to help change this. They wanted to raise awareness and normalise speaking out about mental health, particularly among boys and young men. Jen Beer, children and young people’s health improvement lead for public health at Hertfordshire County Council, tells us how their campaign to get people to ‘Just Talk’ won a bronze public service communications excellence award.

From March to October 2021, there was a reported increased in the number of suicide attempts, fatalities, and interventions at Stevenage train station. A Task and Finish Group was set up to quickly explore what support could be offered locally to people in crisis at the station. A NightLight crisis café has been opened close to the station, with 108 visits in the first month alone. This case study was done jointly with the National Suicide Prevention Alliance and forms part of our suicide prevention resource.

Hertfordshire’s whole systems approach to child obesity includes a successful weight management service, an active school travel plan that discourages car drop-offs, and 10 “healthy hubs”.

Hertfordshire County Council developed an action plan to set out the policies and strategies needed to embed sustainability across all their operations and services.

With the seven-day working strategy, Hertfordshire aimed to improve the flow from the acute into the community, ensuring discharges are not delayed over the weekend while service users wait for a package of care due to processes outside of the Monday to Friday norm. This example of a local initiative forms part of our managing transfers of care resource.

To address the affordable housing issue for staff, the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), One Public Estate, The London Estates Delivery Unit (LEDU) and the Greater London Authority developed the Homes for NHS Staff toolkit.

PHE Behavioural Insights worked with London Borough of Hounslow to conduct a randomised control trial investigating the effect of a healthy food environment checklist designed using behavioural insights on the healthy and unhealthy food purchases made by secondary school students.

Establishing an alliance of statutory, voluntary and community sector partners to revitalise the countywide response to homelessness.