Joint Strategic Needs Assessment
Under the Health and Social Care Act (2012) it became a statutory responsibility of councils and clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to jointly produce a Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) of the health and wellbeing needs of their local area. A JSNA is the means by which local leaders work together to understand and agree the needs of all local people. It informs the joint health and wellbeing strategy setting out their priorities for collective action. Responsibility for the JSNA rests with the Health and Wellbeing Board.
This website forms the live evidence base for Herefordshire Council and Herefordshire and Worcestershire Clinical Commissioning Group's Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA).
The JSNA is concerned with all those wider factors that can have an impact on people’s health and wellbeing: these can include lifestyle factors, such as smoking or diet, economic factors like earnings and employment, environmental factors such as climate change and air quality and social factors such as education, crime and the provision of care services. All of these factors are inter-related and the JSNA attempts to understand how connections between them impact upon individual health and wellbeing. A particular focus is to understand and measure inequalities and deprivation in a local context.
The JSNA aims to identify any areas of unmet need and to provide local context for health and social care service planning. It also helps us to better understand the impact and effectiveness of interventions over time.
The main audience for the JSNA is health and social care commissioners, who use it to plan services. It can also be used as source of evidence to support funding bids and business cases, for educational projects, and by local voluntary and community groups, or members of the public who wish to get a better understanding of their local area, or a group of interest, or want to understand the local prevalence of an issue, or health condition.
Every three years a JSNA Summary Report is produced. The JSNA is produced by Herefordshire Council’s intelligence unit, with contributions from other areas of the council, elected members and partner organisations.
A summary of the key findings of the latest report can be found in the related documents box, together with the previous (2018) summary report.