This meeting of the Health and Adult Social Care Scrutiny Panel was scheduled to receive updates on a range of local health issues and to note the future reports scheduled to be presented to the committee.

GP Access and Recovery Plans

The Panel was scheduled to receive an update from the Greenwich Integrated Care Board on the GP Access and Recovery Plans for Greenwich.

The report pack included a summary of progress against the ten elements of the national Delivery Plan for Recovering Access to Primary Care. These include increasing the use of the NHS App, expanding self-referrals to appropriate services, increasing the uptake of Pharmacy First services, the implementation of digital telephony systems and online consultation tools and the implementation of faster care navigation systems.

The report pack states:

Practices are providing increasing numbers of appointments with more than half being face to face consultations. Over the past year, all practices have moved to digital telephony to improve telephone access and practices are reviewing appointment data and making changes to improve access for patients.

The report pack details several examples of programmes that are being developed to improve access to healthcare in Greenwich, including The Connecting Greenwich programme, the Friends and Family Test and the GP Patient Survey.

The report pack also includes details of the recent performance of individual GP surgeries on a range of metrics.

Neighbourhood Health Plans

The panel was scheduled to receive a report on the progress of the development of Neighbourhood Health Plans in Royal Borough of Greenwich. The report pack describes the 'Connecting Greenwich' approach to health inequality in the borough:

As a result of the social research findings outlined in paragraph 4.6 above, Connecting Greenwich was established to enable neighbourhood development by: • Changing the way we are doing things, not what we are doing. • Building trusting relationships across all parts of the system and with our communities. • Challenging the things that prevent connection.

The report pack goes on to describe several initiatives in Greenwich that are intended to address health inequalities, including work to improve cancer screening awareness and work to improve multi-morbidity proactive care.

The report pack provides details of a range of initiatives in Greenwich that are designed to improve residents' health and wellbeing. These include work to increase the uptake of blood pressure monitoring among black men, a range of community engagement and connection activities in Plumstead, Glyndon, Thamesmead, Horn Park and Charlton, and initiatives to develop community champions in the borough.

Commissioning of Future Reports

This was scheduled to be a brief discussion about the work programme of the Health and Adult Social Care Scrutiny Panel.

The next meeting was scheduled for 20 March 2025. The report pack includes a list of the topics that were scheduled to be discussed at that meeting, including:

• Addiction Strategy
• Approach to Prevention include cancer screening
• Maternal Mortality

It was also noted that the financial aspects of the work of the South East London Integrated Care Board, especially in relation to Mental Health, had not yet been added to the work programme.