Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership’s (HSCP) Health Improvement Team has published its latest annual report highlighting the work of the team in 2023 to 2024.

The team’s focus as always is improving health and wellbeing and reducing health inequalities.

This year’s report reflects the continuing focus on poverty, mental health and inequality as the main drivers of poor health across the city. It showcases work across a wide range of areas from mental health in the early years and childhood to healthcare in prisons, and from the provision of nutritious food to the prevention of tobacco, drug and alcohol harm. It also emphasises the crucial role of people including our staff, volunteers, Modern Apprentices and those in our partner organisations and services working together to improve health in the city.

Highlights are:

• The Community Links Worker programme, which carried out 37,700 appointments, supporting patients referred by GPs to address a wide range of issues. Service users reported a significant increase in wellbeing.
• Place-based work in identified neighbourhoods where Health Improvement staff work in partnership with local, citywide and national organisations, empowering local people to address the issues that matter to them and to build local networks.
• Partnership work with Public Health Scotland to produce a collection of fully anonymised composite stories and posters reflecting the realities and experiences of gambling exposure, participation, risks and harms for people in Glasgow.
• Dedicated work with the Deaf community to reduce barriers to accessing health services, including staff awareness sessions and British Sign Language classes.

The Health Improvement Team is proud that our staff received recognition for their efforts this year:

• North East Youth Health Improvement staff were awarded Innovation of the Year at Glasgow HSCP’s Staff Awards for Excellence in March, for their ‘Chalk the Walk’ suicide prevention project.
• The Mental Health Improvement Team won the UK Public Health Register Innovation in Public Health Award for their work on Black and Minority Ethnic Perinatal Mental Health Research, while team member Michelle Guthrie was shortlisted for a national Global Women in Healthcare Award.

Fiona Moss, our HSCP’s Head of Health Improvement and Inequalities, said:

“Our 2023-24 Health Improvement report highlights the dedication and commitment of our staff in continuing to push for better health outcomes in the face of an increasingly challenging financial landscape.

"Health Improvement staff are continually innovating, enabling partnerships and responding to emerging themes.

"I’m proud of our staff’s hard work to reduce health inequalities and improve the health and wellbeing of Glasgow’s population.”