Health and Wellbeing Board’s boost for mental wellbeing in Cheshire East

Cheshire East Council’s Health and Wellbeing Board has endorsed a strategy to support the mental health of all residents in the region.

The board’s partners will work with the Cheshire and Warrington Public Sector Transformation Board to deliver on recommendations contained in the strategy, entitled ‘Heading in the right direction – An all-age mental wellbeing strategy for Cheshire, Warrington and Halton 2019-21’.

The Health and Wellbeing Board has agreed to support the strategy and advance work to improve partner commissioning as part of sub-regional and local approaches to promoting good mental wellbeing.

The mental wellbeing strategy aims to focus on the promotion of positive mental wellbeing, and the prevention of mental health conditions, via early intervention. Key to this is support for people to protect and improve their own wellbeing and reduce risk factors for mental health problems.

Following extensive partnership work and engagement with stakeholders, the strategy identified five key objectives:

• Speaking up for mental wellbeing, challenging stigma and discrimination and promoting early self-care
• Supporting more people with mental health issues in work and seeking to enter work
• Promoting more places to live that are safe, stable and add to the quality of life
• Having a more integrated approach to mental health support
• Improving the mental health of young people.

Councillor Jill Rhodes, Cheshire East Council cabinet member for public health, said:

This is an important programme that will help to tackle issues that impact on mental health and wellbeing. The burden of mental ill-health is a significant problem across the country, so prevention is a vital element of efforts to tackle the issue.

“Our aim is to develop more effective ways to promote positive mental wellbeing across the population. This will also require targeted actions for those groups at more risk of poor mental health and effective early intervention for those who are struggling.

“With our partners, we have looked for promising approaches to achieve each of the five objectives and the draft strategy recommends a raft of proposals to help deliver this.”