Building blocks

Discrimination and racism cause unfair gaps in health and wellbeing as they prevent some groups of people from having fair access to the essentials like good education, jobs, homes and healthcare, as well as driving hate crime. The long-term stress from experiencing racism and discrimination can lead to mental health problems including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. It can also cause physical health problems like high blood pressure and heart disease. 

To make sure everyone in Sheffield can be healthy and well, we must get rid of all forms of hate and discrimination. This includes identifying where racism and discrimination is hidden in the ways things are traditionally done and how organisations are run.

Priorities for Sheffield

Deliver all the recommendations of the Race Equality Commission including:

• Make sure people from different backgrounds are on governing boards and city partnerships
• Work to become organisations that actively tackle racism and discrimination
• Collect and use data better to understand people's needs, find unfair gaps, and make things better

Having a strong start in life is very important for staying healthy and happy as an adult. When children have unfair differences in their early years, it can lead to unfair differences in health and wellbeing when they grow up. From the time they are babies, children's early experiences affect how they grow physically, mentally, and emotionally. 

Children do better when they have loving relationships with caregivers, good food to eat, chances to play and be with other children, quality education, a stable and supportive family, and protection from harm. Bad experiences like poverty, neglect, or violence can hurt their health for a long time. We want all children in the city to have the best chances in life and for families to have what they need to provide healthy, loving and secure homes where everyone can thrive.

Priorities for Sheffield

• Lower the number of children who die before they turn one year old
• Promote good mental health for parents and carers
• Support the involvement of men in children’s early years
• Encourage parents and carers to use nursery and early years support
• Make sure children are ready to start school

Enabling people to have control over their lives means making sure they have the knowledge, skills, and resources they need. This allows us all to be active in society and make our own decisions about our health, relationships, and future.

To enable people to fulfil their potential we need to remove barriers like poverty and discrimination, create opportunities for lifelong learning and skills development, and create the conditions for people to take up healthy behaviours. This way everyone can have the chance to succeed and live a healthy, happy life.

Priorities for Sheffield

• Help children feel they belong in school, attend regularly, and do well
• Prepare young people for adulthood
• Support the emotional health and wellbeing of children and young people
• Provide good support for people with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND)
• Offer adult education, skills and training
• Ensure everyone can have a dignified death in the place they choose

Good quality work is good for our health and wellbeing. When people have good jobs, they have enough money to be secure and stable, they have a sense of purpose and feel that they belong. Good work can make us feel better about ourselves, improve our mental health, and make us happier with life. A supportive job with fair pay, reasonable hours, a good work-life balance, and chances for promotion can reduce stress and improve physical health.

People living in poverty, those with disabilities or long-term health problems, carers, and people from some minority ethnic groups are more likely to be unemployed or have bad jobs. This can harm their health and wellbeing because of physical dangers, low pay, job insecurity, and too few or too many work hours. 

Priorities for Sheffield

• Make sure everyone has a fair chance to get good jobs
• Help people stay in their jobs
• Ensure fair pay for everyone
• Provide good working conditions
• Offer opportunities for volunteering 

Having a healthy standard of living has a big impact on how healthy and happy people are. A healthy standard of living means we can afford nutritious meals, live in safe and warm homes, and we can access education, leisure activities, and social connections, all of which improve our overall wellbeing. 

Poverty means not having enough money to meet our needs and it harms our health in many ways. It causes stress, makes people feel less in control, and prevents access to the essentials. It also makes it harder to maintain healthy habits and limits opportunities to take part in society. 

Priorities for Sheffield

• Work together to end poverty
• Make sure everyone has a decent, affordable home
• Ensure fair access to high quality food
• Develop the city’s economy so that everyone benefits
• Provide fair access to WiFi for everyone

Healthy places and communities are environments where everyone can be physically, mentally, and socially well. These are places where people can live, work, play, and connect in ways that help them stay healthy and safe and enjoy life to the fullest. 

In healthy places and communities there are green spaces to enjoy, high quality affordable housing, clean air and water, healthy food options, and places to be active. These places also protect people from companies that encourage us to buy things that are bad for our health like junk food, tobacco, alcohol and gambling. 

Healthy places and communities enable people to connect with others and build friendships, they ensure everyone is included and treated fairly, and that everyone has what they need to be healthy. In these places and communities, people understand the current and future challenges we face, and take action together.

Priorities for Sheffield

• Provide good public transport
• Create spaces that encourage walking, cycling and wheeling
• Ensure access to nature, wildlife and greenspace
• Keep the air clean
• Protect people from harmful industries
• Ensure community safety
• Build strong relationships and a sense of belonging in communities
• Empower communities to work together and take action

NHS services can help keep us healthy by preventing illnesses, treating injuries and diseases, managing long-term health problems, giving emergency care, and helping with recovery. Social care services provide support with everyday activities like bathing and eating, doing household chores, helping with medicines, providing emotional support, encouraging social activities, finding suitable housing, protecting vulnerable people of all ages from harm, and supporting carers. 

How services are set up and run affects the unfair gaps in health and wellbeing between people. Often, the groups who are the worst off and need NHS and social care services the most have the hardest time accessing them. They might struggle to get into services, have bad experiences, or not get better like they should. The reasons for this are complicated and include: not enough services or people not knowing about them, services having strict rules or conditions about who can use them, services being hard to find or not open when people want to use them, services being too far away or expensive to get to, services treating people unfairly, not respecting their culture, not using language they can understand or being unwelcoming. Sometimes people might hear wrong information about services or be afraid to use them. 

We need to make sure that services in Sheffield are fair and work for everyone. This means listening to communities and making sure that people with the worst health and the greatest need can get the care and support they need.

Priorities for Sheffield

• Listen to and involve groups of people who have the most difficulty accessing services
• Focus on building strong relationships to achieve better results and help people gain more confidence and control over their lives
• Share and use data to work together on solutions
• Address language and communication barriers
• Ensure everyone can access and use digital technology
• Plan services and develop the workforce to meet current and future needs

Having clean air, enough water, a stable climate and a flourishing natural environment is really important for staying healthy. Pollution, the destruction of plants and animals, and global warming harm the planet and harm human health. They cause extreme weather events like floods, droughts and heatwaves. They also make some diseases spread more easily and disrupt the way food is grown and produced. 

People who are already poor or vulnerable are hurt the worst by these problems. It's really important that we work to make things better for everyone. We need to make sure that our efforts to fix unfair differences in health and wellbeing don't harm the environment or make global warming worse. And we need to make sure that we're working to fix the climate and environment crisis in a way that doesn't make unfair differences in health and wellbeing even worse.

Priorities for Sheffield

• Reduce greenhouse gases to reach ‘Net Zero’ 
• Prepare to cope with and adapt to the impacts of climate change