Public Health Annual Report 2024

West Berkshire Council's Public Health team are on a mission to help residents be healthy and active.

From vaccinations to drug misuse support, quitting smoking to helping children adopt healthy eating habits, their annual report outlines the health priorities and areas for improvement for the district.

Authored by West Berkshire's interim Director of Public Health, Prof, Dr John Ashton, this is the first West Berkshire focused annual report as previous reports have covered Berkshire as a whole.

 It reflects on key successes over the last year and highlights upcoming priorities and areas where West Berkshire performs better than (or similarly to) the national average in terms of public health, including:

• Childhood vaccination uptake is higher than the England average
• Levels of new sexually transmitted infections (STI's) are significantly lower than the England average
• Levels of overweight and obese children are lower than the England average
• Levels of adults being admitted to hospital due to falls and levels of adults reporting long term musculoskeletal problems are lower than the England average

Councillor Patrick Clark, West Berkshire's Executive Member for Adult Social care and Public Health says, 

"This is a great report which showing that not just by prioritising, but also actively improving the health of local people, we have a lot to be proud of.

"Health is of so important for us all, and there will always be more that we can do to advise and support our residents. So, over the next year (2024/25) we will focus on a number of areas to improve our service.

"These include increasing the number of residents quitting smoking using the Local Stop Smoking Service and Support Grant, developing our prevention work with children and young people and our mental health and aging well programmes, particularly supporting those living with dementia."

Read the full report here.