OUR PLANS

The Tobacco-free Greater Manchester Strategy sets out our ambition to get a third of people here to stop smoking by 2021. This will result in 115,000 fewer smokers, supporting a tobacco-free generation and ultimately helping to make smoking history.

Great progress has been made over the last ten years, but:

• 13 people a day in Greater Manchester (that’s 4,500 each year) die of cancers and other terminal illnesses related to smoking
• 60,000 more people smoke here than anywhere else (according to the national average rate)
• Every hour another child starts smoking in Greater Manchester – that’s a whole classroom every day

We’re aiming to cut smoking to one person in eight (ideally fewer) over the next four years by:

• Offering new ways to quit, including digital services such as apps providing tailored support
• Targeting specific groups of people such as pregnant women – we have an incentive scheme encouraging the most vulnerable pregnant women to stay smoke-free
• Ending smoking outside hospital doors and reducing it in our own workplaces
• Aiming to create more smoke-free areas in public spaces such as parks and meeting points
• Promoting our Ditch or Switch message, which supports swapping cigarettes for vaping

Our £134m action plan will transform mental health services and target the root causes of mental illness at an earlier stage. This investment is the biggest and most ambitious of its kind in the country.

We’re working to:

• Better connect public services, communities and individuals to improve people’s mental wellbeing and life chances
• Improve access to a good range of mental health services across Greater Manchester
• Make services more joined up and efficient, improving how people experience them
• Use the Partnership to agree quality-of-care standards and clear, measurable results
• Improve public attitudes and behaviour towards people with mental health needs and reduce the stigma and discrimination that people with mental health problems say they experience, whether in their personal relationships, their social lives, at work or in their treatment within the services

We’ve also promised to spend more (60% of our mental health budget) on supporting the emotional and mental health needs of children, young people and new mums.

With a wide-ranging plan over four years, we aim to:

• Make sure thousands more children can get mental health support where and when they need it, avoiding the prospect of any child who needs help being turned away
• Support all schools in giving their students the support and confidence-boost they need
• Help new and prospective mums who experience serious mental health problems (babies and children whose mums have poor mental health can be affected for life)
• Provide hospital care here in Greater Manchester, so no-one has to be treated elsewhere in the country
• Make sure anyone in a mental health crisis can get support right away, and that no one ends up cared for in a police cell
• Help people with serious mental illnesses to take better care of their physical health – at the moment, these people die 15 to 20 years earlier than average for their age and area
• Offer extra support to people who’re unemployed in the long-term or who’re at risk of losing their jobs because of a mental health problem
• Reduce adult suicides by ten per cent
• Improve dementia care and shorten the time people have to wait for help

Before April 2016, our dementia diagnosis rates were already higher than the national average. Now, with added investment and more rapid changes to the way we do things, seven more people a day are being diagnosed than in most other places.

We’ve put £2.29m into our long-term programme Dementia United, so we can provide even better care and support on people’s doorsteps.

This includes:

• Agreeing standards and ways of working, to make sure help people get the same top-quality care wherever they are in Greater Manchester
• Introducing more dementia-friendly services and developing resources such as awareness toolkits
• Bringing together professionals and volunteers to share best-practice
• Joining forces with existing local projects, as well as funding new ones
• Making the most of our world-class dementia research to try out new treatments

But there’s a lot of work to do to provide people here with cancer services that match the best in the world.

If we’re going to prevent more cases of cancer, we’ll have to overcome some big challenges. More adults smoke in Greater Manchester than in other parts of England. What’s more, fewer people here attend screening for breast, cervical and bowel cancers than in other areas. So we’re missing opportunities to spot problems early on.

Lots of organisations and groups of people across Greater Manchester have been involved in developing our cancer plan. These include hospitals, local councils, GPs, voluntary groups, charities and social enterprises, as well as people affected by the disease.

Our plan sets out six key aims along with details of how we’re going to achieve them – from helping to prevent cancer and providing earlier and better diagnosis to improving care and making it consistent across all boroughs.

We’ve promised to:

• Reduce the number of adults smoking by more than one in ten by 2020
• Improve one-year survival rates by more than three quarters by 2020
• Prevent 1,300 avoidable cancer deaths before 2021
• Offer the best-possible patient experience, achieving an average overall rating of nine out of ten in the national survey
• Exceed the national standard for starting treatment within 62 days of urgent cancer referral
• By 2019, make recovery care available to all patients when they finish their treatment

Our maternity and newborn plan is based on the national Better Births maternity review (link or no link). We spoke to lots of women and their families who use, or have used, maternity services as well as the staff that deliver them. We want to improve quality and continuity of care during and after pregnancy. Our plan includes hospitals, community services and specialist services to ensure every child ‘starts well’.

We’re aiming to:

• Promote safe and effective maternity and newborn care
• Give women more choice and services personalised to them
• Increase continuity of carer with women seen by the same healthcare professionals during their pregnancy
• Ensure babies and families that need neonatal care have access to the best possible neonatal care
• Provide parents with the postnatal care they need for their new family
• Better recognition and treatment of mental health during and after pregnancy
• Creating services that lead to the best outcomes

We’re aiming to prevent the rise in type 2 diabetes by:

• Improving the health of children and young adults
• Identifying those most at risk so we can support them to make healthy changes

We want to help people control their diabetes by:

• Developing local guidelines about how to use medicine to control diabetes
• Providing information and education to help people manage their condition
• Creating better links between the community and hospitals so they work in partnership to plan each person’s diabetes care
• Reversing type 2 diabetes where possible through healthy changes
• Helping people to access regular tests to monitor their overall health such as kidney function tests and eye screenings
• Helping young people’s move from children and young people’s diabetes services to adult diabetes services as smoothly as possible

We also want to reduce the profound impact diabetes complications can have on people living with them as well as their families. We’re aiming to reduce heart, mental health and kidney complications through better detection and care management.

We’ve developed a Greater Manchester Learning Disability strategy, shaped by people with learning disabilities and their families too. Our plan has 10 priority areas:

• Working with people with learning disabilities and their families to shape our strategy and plans
• Supporting people to speak up for themselves and their peers ensuring they get the care and support they need
• Creating services that give people with complex needs greater choice and control
• Improving health outcomes for people with learning disabilities
• Creating a sense of belonging not isolation
• Improving housing options so people with learning disabilities can live as independently as possible
• Supporting people with learning disabilities into work
• Developing health and care staff across Greater Manchester so they are skilled to meet the needs of people with learning disabilities
• Helping children and young people with learning disabilities and their families
• Supporting victims of crime who have learning disabilities and helping offenders with learning disabilities make different choices

To do this, we’re improving services for under-fives and supporting young people to be ‘life ready’ when they leave school for work or further education. We’re also improving access to children and adolescent mental health services and making sure children with long-term conditions such as asthma, diabetes or epilepsy get the best possible care.