How Sheffield Council is using rapid impact assessments to mitigate coronavirus impact

A progress report on this was discussed during a recent meeting of the health and wellbeing board.

The report detailed how they are using the rapid impact assessment to inform work the council and other providers do when tackling the impact of the virus.

Dr Eleanor Rutter, who wrote and presented the report, said: "Taking the right action is clearly dependent on knowing as much as possible about the impact of both covid19 and the lockdown in the medium and long term because the impact in Sheffield will be felt for years to come.

"The purpose of the health impact assessment is to try to understand as much as we can about the pandemic and the response we had to make across society to the pandemic.

"Rapidity is absolutely essential to this. We have commissioners and providers both formal and ad hoc wanting to do the right thing immediately and we want to get as much intelligence to them as fast as we can to support their efforts and focus it where it’s most needed.

"We want to be as broad as possible and hear from as many partners as possible, essentially what we are trying to do is document what people’s lived experiences are now.

"We are hoping this piece of work will feed into the recovery and where we want to be in the future - there are positive things and negative things that are going to help us move into that new way of being in the new world."

The report said the assessment will be made up of a mixture of local quantitative and qualitative data, anecdote, case studies, stories and literature reviews. It added that service-level intelligence from all sector providers will help identify emerging issues, demands and capacity of providers to inform how they respond to needs.

Dr Rutter added there was a small steering group meeting once a week to look at the issues and that the assessment would help ensure efforts were focussed on areas hit hardest by the pandemic.

She said: "Prior to covid we had something like a 20 year gap in healthy life expectancy in Sheffield and then covid hit and it didn’t take very long to see the impact of that was on those in our most vulnerable communities. When we were forced to lockdown, the impact was again on our most vulnerable communities.

"We are all impacted by covid and lockdown but we are not all impacted equally. There is an analogy that we are all in it together as on a stormy sea but some of us are on beautiful, safe ocean liners and other people are on tiny little boats with a single paddle.

"The good news on that grim picture is that as the health and wellbeing board we have committed to closing the gap on healthy life expectancy.

"Coronavirus has made this more of a challenge and clearly we need to do something additional to the current health and wellbeing strategy."

Editor's message: Thank you for reading this story. The dramatic events of 2020 are having a major impact on our advertisers and thus our revenues. The Star is more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription to support our journalism. You can subscribe here www.thestar.co.uk/subscriptions for unlimited access to Sheffield news and information online. Every subscription helps us continue providing trusted, local journalism and campaign on your behalf for our city.