Plymouth extends health improvement deal

Livewell Southwest awarded £5.5m

Livewell Southwest has been awarded the contract for health improvement services in Plymouth for another five years.

The health and social care provider has been doing the job for Plymouth City Council for more than a decade.

The £5.5 million deal involves helping people stop smoking, be a healthy weight, more mobile and to improve their wellbeing at work and their mental health.

The council said it means the city has a healthier population, reduced healthcare treatment costs and more resilient communities.

The return on investment for smoking services alone is an estimated £5.8 million a year, equating to £29 million over the life of the contract.

Livewell Southwest was directly awarded the contract, without it going to tender, because the council is satisfied with its work.

Cabinet member for health and social care Cllr Mary Aspinall (Lab, Sutton and Mount Gould) said the benefits included continuity, experience and knowledge.

Livewell was an integral part of the local healthcare system, well embedded throughout the acute services and critical to Thrive Plymouth which helped to reduce health inequalities in the city, she said.

The company was “flexible” and “go the extra mile”.

She said particular examples were during covid and when thousands of people had to leave their homes after an unexploded World War Two bomb was discovered in a garden in Keyham in February.

Livewell supported people’s wellbeing at the Life Centre. Residents eventually moved back home after the bomb was taken out to sea and detonated.

Cllr Aspinall said anyone who went to the Life Centre was “amazed” by what Livewell had pulled together in a short time to help the Keyham residents.

Cllr Sue Dann (Lab, Sutton and Mount Gould) said Livewell was a very good citywide collaborative partner and worked with Plymouth Active Leisure to respond to social subscribing referrals. The company would also have a designated space at the new Brickfields sporting complex in Devonport.

“We are looking at how we can use different ways of working to impact real change and other partners will be there too,” she said. “I think in ten years time we will find health inequalities level up a bit.”

Council leader Tudor Evans (Lab, Ham) said £5.5 million was a lot of money and questioned how performance was monitored.

He said there had been some improvements in health, but some things were going backwards, in particular women’s health. Women were living longer, but less well, he claimed.

Cllr Mark Lowry (Lab, Southway) said he would be interested in the health experts’ thoughts about how takeaways and gambling establishments in some areas negatively impact on health.

The council’s public health consultant Kamal Patel said rules restricting takeaways around schools had been embedded into planning policy.

The policy puts a 400-metre zone around secondary schools in the Plymouth area where new outlets will be opposed.

He said more work was being done on the impact of takeaways and gambling establishments on health in the city.

People live complex lives in communities in environments that often do not help them have healthy lives,” he said. “We have made a start on that work in Plymouth.”

When it came to monitoring he said: “We regularly have meetings with Livewell and they are reaching the people by going into wellbeing hubs and supporting areas of high deprivation in Plymouth.”