The Cheshire East Tartan Rug is our way of understanding how health and wellbeing varies by ward across Cheshire East. It can be found on our joint strategic needs assessment website as a pdf file for printing and examining in full. By clicking on the “overviews of health and wellbeing” tile. Our latest version reflects the most recent data available at June 2022.
As well as this, we have developed a new dashboard to help people to understand what the Tartan Rug is saying and to look in more detail at areas particularly important to them.
So what is the Tartan Rug?
The Tartan Rug is a tool to look at the health and wellbeing of each ward and compares it to all other wards across England in relation to a variety of different health issues. All of the data for the Tartan Rug comes from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities and can be accessed using their Local Health profiles.
It is a particularly important tool for us in Cheshire East, as although Cheshire East on average looks to be similar or better than the England average, there is very significant variation across the wards in Cheshire East, with some wards experiencing considerably worse health and wellbeing. This variation is known as health inequality.
We will talk you through how to use the tool over the course of this user guide, however, it is important to note that although the Tartan Rug helps us compare wards across Cheshire East across other areas in England it does not allow us to see overall trends over time, or pick up on challenges that the whole country is experiencing.
We will now take you through the dashboard.
The dashboard has several pages on the left hand side that can be selected.
The first provides an introduction to the tool and the second provides some more technical information about the analysis in the dashboard.
The Tartan Rug can be found in full on the third page labelled “Tartan Rug”. All though you can scroll across to see the whole tool, you can also focus in on particularly areas buy using the drop down menus at the top, to select a different year, a particular Care Community, or particular wards or health issues.
Where indicators are red, the ward is in the worst 40% of wards across England, where it is green, they are in the best 40% of wards and where it is amber, they are in the middle 20%
As well as this, by clicking on the “Crewe Central and Gawsworth” comparison at the top of the tool, you can quickly see the extent of variation between wards in Cheshire East, and by clicking on “Crewe Central and Wybunbury” you can see the extent of variation even within a single care community.
The next three overview pages give you a summary of some of the key information provided within the Tartan Rug.
The Cheshire East overview page provides you with a sense of how the Cheshire East average compares to England across indicators included in the Tartan Rug. It also highlights the indicators where Cheshire East is significantly worse than the England average.
In the 2022 Tartan Rug this is for: admissions for injury age 0-4, emergency admissions age 0-4, binge drinking in adults, hospital stays for self harm, emergency admissions for hip fractures and emergency admissions for all causes. The time periods the data reflects is also included and you will notice that this refers to time periods some time ago. Data is particularly out of date for binge drinking for example. This is because there is a time delay for reliable good quality data to be published. You may also notice that the time periods are quite big (for example 4 years), this allows us to be confident that these reflect longer term pictures rather than the natural variation that occurs from year to year.
The Cheshire East wards overview pages counts up all the ward figures rather than at looking at an average for Cheshire East and also highlights health issues where wards are most commonly worse than the England average.
The Care Communities overview gives a sense of how health and wellbeing is on average in each Care Community. The RAG status highlights an overall figure compared to the England average. This latest version shows that Crewe is overall worse than the England average. Macclesfield, Nantwich and Rural, CHOC and SMASH, are similar to the England average, and BDP, Knutsford and CHAW are better than the national average.
Moving on to the Comparisons with previous years page.
This highlights where Care Communities have seen a change in the number of indicators where they are worse or better than the England average. It can be difficult to interpret however there is guidance about this on the page. Also, by selecting from the filters on the right, you can see which Care Communities have had an overall improving picture, which, had a worsening picture, and in which places the picture was mixed.
The final three pages allow you to compare the Cheshire East ward averages with other areas outside of Cheshire East. The first allows you to compare with other local authorities in our Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care System. The second, allows you to compare with other local authorities that Cheshire East is nearby too, and the third compares against other local authorities that are similar to Cheshire East in terms of social and demographic information such as age, ethnicity and deprivation. Whilst all of these comparisons are helpful to see, it is important to keep in mind that they don’t show the variation across Cheshire East, and the user must always keep these health inequalities in mind.
So what are the next steps?
We need to reduce the inequalities across Cheshire East and our new dashboard will allow us to more efficiently monitor progress and will be continue to be updated regularly, with the next update due for later this year.
So how will we do reduce inequalities?
Health inequalities can only be reduced by working together to improve health and wellbeing starting from pregnancy right through to the last days of life. We need to consider not just health and care services but all the important wider determinants of health that feed in to giving our residents the best possible health and wellbeing. The Joint Strategic Needs Assessment and Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy can help us to do this.
The Tartan Rug should be used in combination with our more in—depth topic specific reviews, which are also published on our website, but also in conjunction with your own expertise and experiences, so that we can make the very best of our efforts to improve the health and wellbeing of all our residents across Cheshire East.