Your views are needed: Smoking in Pregnancy – A Public Health Nursing Approach

Improving Performance in Practice (iPiP) is working in collaboration with Public Health England (PHE) to review the role of health visiting and practice nursing in smoking in pregnancy and to develop tools to support their work.

To assist the team in understanding the situation, identifying current practice and to inform the development of training and learning resources, they have developed a survey for health visitors and would like to gather information on:

What you currently offer in your clinical practice area
What you believe would support you to work effectively and confidently with women and their families

They would appreciate you taking the time to give your views and feedback on Smoking in pregnancy – A Public Health Nursing Approach.

The survey should take no more than 10 minutes.

Survey closing date: Friday 13 April 2018

Go to Smoking in Pregnancy survey for HVs

PHE urges vigilance about spotting signs of scarlet fever

Public Health England (PHE) is advising parents to be aware of the signs and symptoms of scarlet fever following a substantial increase in reported cases across England in 2017 to 2018.

Scarlet fever is a very contagious, seasonal bacterial illness that mainly affects children and is not uncommon for this time of year.

The latest Health Protection Report showed 6,225 cases of scarlet fever had been reported since mid-September 2017, compared to 3,764 for the same period last season. There were 719 cases reported for the most recent week (22 to 28 January 2018).

Scarlet fever is usually a mild illness; PHE is advising parents to be on the lookout for scarlet fever symptoms, which include a sore throat, headache and fever with a characteristic fine, pinkish or red rash with a sandpapery feel. If signs of scarlet fever are suspected, it is important to contact your local GPor NHS 111. Early treatment with antibiotics is important and can help reduce the risk of complications such as pneumonia and the spread of the infection. Children or adults diagnosed with scarlet fever are advised to stay at home until at least 24 hours after the start of antibiotic treatment to avoid spreading the infection to others.

PHE is also urging GPs, paediatricians, and other health practitioners to be mindful when assessing patients and promptly notify local health protection teams of cases and outbreaks.

For further information for on scarlet fever visit the NHS Choices website.

Guidelines for the management of scarlet fever are also available from the PHE website.

PHE: 2018 child health profiles

Annual update of data in the child health profiles interactive tool. Profiles providing an overview of child health and wellbeing for each local authority in England.

The profiles draw together information to present a picture of child health and wellbeing in each local area in a user-friendly format.

Those working in local government and health services can use the profiles as a tool to help:

understand the needs of their communities
improve the health and wellbeing of children and young people
reduce health inequalities

Go to PHE Child Health Profiles

PHE’s Start4Life and Amazon Alexa helping mothers to breastfeed for longer

Evidence shows the right support helps mothers to breastfeed for longer. Public Health England’s programme Start4Life has created the Breastfeeding Friend to encourage parents to adopt healthy behaviours. It is available for free on a range of platforms, including Facebook Messenger, and now for the first time it will also be available as a skill for Amazon Alexa’s voice service.

Mothers can ask Alexa a variety of questions about breastfeeding and the answers will be provided tailored to the age of the baby. This means that they can get helpful advice even when their hands are full.

Dr Cheryll Adams CBE, Executive Director Institute of Health Visiting, said:

“This innovative new service will enhance those already provided by health professionals. Whether a mother manages to establish breastfeeding is largely determinant on the support she receives in the first few days after birth. However, with such short hospital stays, professional support is not as widely available as it once was. To have this back up, which can be accessed from anywhere, will be hugely helpful and we expect health visitors to want to promote the service.”

PHE recommends exclusive breastfeeding for around the first 6 months. Breastfeeding boosts a baby’s ability to fight illness and infection, and babies who are not breastfed are more likely to get diarrhoea and chest infections. Breastfeeding also lowers a mother’s risk of breast cancer and may reduce the risk of ovarian cancer.

Almost three-quarters of women start breastfeeding when their child is born, however by 6 to 8 weeks this drops to just 44%. This makes breastfeeding rates in England among the lowest in the world.

A new survey of 1,000 mothers of young children commissioned by Public Health England (PHE) revealed that in hindsight, mothers wished they had been better prepared for breastfeeding. Before the birth of their first child, mums’ biggest priorities were:

buying baby equipment (66%)
preparing for labour (49%)
buying baby clothes (40%)

However, post birth, nearly a quarter (24%) wished they had read about and were more prepared for breastfeeding and 1 in 4 (26%) of those who had given breast milk to their first child wished they had known that asking for help can make a real difference.

Viv Bennett, Chief Nurse at Public Health England said:

“Breastfeeding, whilst natural, is something that mothers and babies learn together, and whilst learning, women may have questions and setbacks. PHE is working with health professionals to make sure women are not embarrassed and receive timely help. Health professionals do an excellent job of caring for new mothers, but they cannot be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which is where our Breastfeeding Friend from Start4Life is designed to help. This tool, together with the range of support materials from Start4Life, can provide breastfeeding advice at any time of night or day and support mothers and their partners and families through challenges they may face.

“These digital offerings will help guide new parents through their first weeks of breastfeeding and beyond, providing help at any time of the day or night, and aim to complement support and advice from health care professionals and breastfeeding specialists. The information provided by all the Start4Life services is NHS approved and both services are independent of Amazon and Facebook.”

Resources for parents

Amazon Alexa – Once you’ve enabled the Breastfeeding Friend you can get to know the skill by saying ‘Alexa, open Breastfeeding Friend’.

Alexa Skills - Breastfeeding Friend from Start4Life

The new service is in addition to the interactive Start4life Breastfeeding Friend chatbot, accessed through Facebook Messenger, which launched last year, and the Start4Life website.

Resources for healthcare professionals

You can now order posters from the Start4Life breastfeeding campaign resource centre to help support your local activity – and a range of digital assets are available, including: TV screensavers, Empty belly poster, Web banners

Go to PHE Start4Life Breastfeeding resource centre

PHE – National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) Local Authority Profile

The NCMP Local Authority Profile online data tool for child obesity for England was updated on 9 January 2018. This annual update adds data for the academic year 2016 to 2017 at local authority (LA) level. It also includes a new ‘severe obesity’ indicator, not reported on separately before. Severely obese children are at risk of developing a number of serious acute and chronic health problems. These children therefore pose a significant concern in terms of their health and well-being, and may require the provision of specialist services. Although in relative terms the prevalence of severe obesity is low, in absolute terms this represents a large number of children nationally (14,787 Reception children and 22,646 Year 6 children). Severe obesity prevalence in children has strong associations with ethnic group, deprivation and sex and there is significant variation in prevalence across the country.

The NCMP tool displays prevalence of obesity, overweight, healthy weight and underweight at local, regional and national level over time, for children in Reception (aged 4 to 5 years) and Year 6 (aged 10 to 11 years). Users can compare LA data by region or between ‘CIPFA nearest neighbours’ (LAs with similar characteristics). The tool also presents inequalities in obesity prevalence by sex, deprivation and ethnic group by LA. In addition trend data for England, for obesity prevalence and overweight (including obese) prevalence in boys and girls has been brought together in one place. A short statistical commentary can be found here

Go to NCMP Local Authority Profile online data tool

New e-learning: Community-Centred Approaches to Health Improvement

Public Health England (PHE) has been working with Health Education England (HEE) to produce a new e-Learning for Health programme on community-centred approaches to health improvement.

These two new e-learning modules are suitable for practitioners, managers and commissioners who want:

an update on evidence and guidance on community-centred approaches to health improvement;
to take a more strategic and planned approach to scaling-up community-centred approaches.

Communities matter for health. A community where people are well connected, are inclusive and respectful of all and are involved in local decision-making, are healthy communities. Improving population health and reducing health inequalities requires us to address these community factors and work with and alongside community members to improve the things that matter for their health.

The e-learning modules are based on PHE’s guide to community-centred approaches for health and wellbeing and support PHE’s growing programme of work on community-centred and asset-based approaches.

Module 1 covers the evidence and theory on why and how communities matter for health and what approaches work.
Module 2 involves practical exercises to apply the knowledge to practice and to help develop strategic and practical plans for taking community-centred approaches forward within local places and organisations.

Access e-learning: Community-Centred Approaches to Health Improvement via e-LfH portal

Accessing this e-learning is through the e-LfH portal (you will need your NMC Pin to register). Please note the iHV does not host the e-LfH site. If you experience any problems accessing the site, contact e-LfH.

PHE – Healthy Child Programme: rapid review on safeguarding

Rapid review to update the safeguarding guidance for the Healthy Child Programme for children aged 5 to 19.

The Healthy Child Programme sets out the recommended framework of universal and progressive services for children and young people in England to promote their health and wellbeing.

The purpose of this rapid review is to update the evidence regarding safeguarding guidance, focusing on prevention and early intervention.

The review looks at relevant systematic review level evidence, supplemented with some primary impact evaluations in the areas of preventing or intervening early with:

child abuse and neglect
child sexual abuse and exploitation
intimate partner violence
female genital mutilation
gang violence

Go to PHE - Healthy Child Programme: rapid review on safeguarding

PHE Guidance – Scarlet fever: managing outbreaks in schools and nurseries

Guidelines to help health protection teams control outbreaks of scarlet fever in schools, nurseries and other childcare settings.

These guidelines were first developed by the national incident management team (IMT) in response to the upsurge in scarlet fever in April 2014 and subsequently updated by a subgroup of the IMT in 2016 and 2017 to reflect the changing epidemiology, evidence and feedback on implementation in practice.

A set of scarlet fever FAQs – intended for health professionals to give to the public – are available at: Scarlet fever: symptoms, diagnosis, treatment.

Please also share our iHV Parent Tips on Coping with Scarlet Fever

Go to PHE Guidance - Scarlet fever: managing outbreaks in schools and nurseries

PHE – Duncan Selbie’s Friday Message 19 January 2018

Short weekly update from the CEO of Public Health England (PHE), including:

publication of a review of the latest evidence on the health and wellbeing benefits of making high streets in urban settings more inclusive, safer and healthier, particularly in areas of high deprivation.
a Code of Practice was launched by an alliance of some of the largest out-of-home food and drink companies, including McDonalds, Wetherspoons, Whitbread, Greggs and Starbucks. This sets out their public commitment to achieve the sugar reduction target of 20% by 2020 promised in the Childhood Obesity Plan.
publication of PHE’s fifth Routes to Diagnosis update which marks a decade’s worth of data, covering over 3 million diagnoses of cancer, making it the most comprehensive data of its kind in the world.
appointment of Tracey Crouch MP as the Minister for Loneliness. This is a new portfolio to tackle a problem that affects 9 million people, both old and young
the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine includes an article on e-cigarettes, which refers positively to the UK position emphasising PHE’s contribution to harm reduction.

Duncan Selbie's Friday message: 19 January 2018

PHE – Duncan Selbie’s Friday Message 12 January 2018

Short weekly update from the CEO of Public Health England (PHE), including:

PHE has activated the ‘Catch it. Bin it. Kill it’ campaign to spread the message that the transfer of flu can be mitigated by simple actions, such as catching our coughs and sneezes in tissues and washing our hands
Fast Track Cities Initiative, which brings together all those already working to tackle HIV across the capital
launch of the Department for Energy, Food and Rural Affairs’ 25 Year Environment Plan, which outlines steps for a cleaner, greener Britain – PHE has worked closely with DEFRA on the plan
NHS Smokefree Pledge, developed by the Smokefree Action Coalition, was launched in Parliament- which publically commits NHS hospitals and mental health services to become truly smokefree by 2019.

Duncan Selbie's Friday message: 12 January 2018