Director of Public Health Health Protection Assurance Report

Local Authorities are responsible for providing independent scrutiny and challenging the arrangements of NHS England (NHSE), UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and providers. The responsibility for the provision of the health protection function is spread across the following organisations.

• North Tyneside Council through the leadership role of the DPH, has a delegated health protection duty from the Secretary of State to provide information and advice to relevant organisations to ensure all parties discharge their roles effectively for the protection of the local population. This leadership role relates mainly to functions for which the responsibility for commissioning or coordinating lies elsewhere.
• Screening and Immunisation Teams (SITs) are employed by NHSE. The SITs provide local leadership and support to providers in delivering improvements in quality and changes in screening and immunisation programmes. The SITs are also responsible for ensuring that accurate and timely data is available for monitoring vaccine uptake and coverage.
• The White Paper ‘Integration and Innovation: working together to improve health and social care for all’ was published on 11th February 2021. The White Paper included a proposal to create a power for the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to require NHS England to discharge public health functions delegated by the Secretary of State alongside the existing section 7A provisions.

By these means, there is ‘a greater range of delegation options for section 7A public health services, including the ability for onward delegation of the function into collaborative arrangements, such as a section 75 partnership arrangement’.

UKHSA brings together a wide range of public health functions and is responsible for delivering the specialist health protection response to cases, incidents, and outbreaks; and provides expert advice to NHSE to commission immunisation and screening programmes, as well as several other responsibilities relating to surveillance and planning.

Northeast and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board (NENC ICB) commissions treatment services (e.g., hospital inpatient treatment, nurses working with specific infections, such as TB) that comprise an important component of strategies to control communicable disease.

Emergency preparedness, resilience and response functions are provided by all category one responders; this includes the Local Authority, UKHSA, NENC ICB, NHSE, Emergency Services and NHS Foundation Trusts. All these agencies are represented on the Local Health Resilience Partnership (LHRP) and the Local Resilience Forum (LRF).