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Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2026 - 2031

Our Vision, Priorities and Commitments

Our Vision

To reduce inequality, increase years of healthy life and promote improved mental and physical health and wellbeing for everyone in Cheshire West and Chester.

Our Priorities

  1. Give every child the best start in life.
  2. Enable all children, young people and adults to maximise their capabilities and have control over their lives.
  3. Create fair employment and good work for all.
  4. Ensure a healthy standard of living for all.
  5. Create and develop healthy and sustainable places and communities.
  6. Strengthen the role and impact of ill health prevention.
  7. Tackle racism, discrimination and their outcomes.
  8. Pursue environmental sustainability and health equity together.

Our Commitments

We recognise that some commitments are relevant to more than one priority. However, to keep the Strategy as short as possible and easy to understand, we have included them in the most appropriate priority area.

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Priority 1: Give every child the best start in life

  1. Increase the uptake of breastfeeding.
  2. Improve children’s oral health.
  3. Improve readiness for school.
  4. Improve perinatal (from becoming pregnant to a year after giving birth), children and young people’s mental health.
  5. Increase the uptake of vaccinations.
  6. Deliver the Families First programme, which aims to transform children’s social care by prioritising early intervention and family support, with safeguarding remaining at the heart of the work of our partnership.
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Priority 2: Enable all children, young people, and adults to maximise their capabilities and have control over their lives

  1. Reduce the educational attainment gap so that there is less disparity in outcomes between different groups of students.
  2. Enhance career guidance and pathways into local employment.
  3. Improve youth service support for young people’s health, wellbeing and life chances.
  4. Increase volunteering opportunities.
  5. Increase neurodivergent identification and support, including ADHD, Autism and Developmental Co-ordination Disorder.
  6. Extend skills and training programmes, including supported internships.
  7. Improve learning disability care and support.
  8. Enhance all age mental health diagnosis, treatment and care.
  9. Reduce domestic abuse.
  10. Enhance care for unpaid carers.
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Priority 3: Create fair employment and good work for all

  1. Support a healthy workforce.
  2. Help people into employment.
  3. Support residents living with long term conditions, severe mental illness, mental health conditions and substance use to secure and retain employment.
  4. Support people living with learning disabilities and/or neurodiversity into volunteering or employment.
  5. Support our businesses to become Anchor Institutions and maximise social value opportunities through employing and buying local where possible.
  6. Reduce digital exclusion by making it easier for people to be online.
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Priority 4: Ensure a healthy standard of living for all

  1. Deliver the borough’s Local Plan and make the borough a healthier place to live, work and be active.
  2. Regenerate the borough to provide connected and safe places.
  3. Tackle poverty, including child poverty.
  4. Reduce homelessness through delivering the Cheshire West and Chester Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy.
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Priority 5: Create and develop healthy and sustainable places and communities

  1. Improve people’s experience by integrating health and care services through a community-led approach from conception to end of life.
  2. Support the provision of home adaptations and improved housing conditions via Disabled Facilities Grants, Safe and Warm Grants and Decent Home Loans.
  3. Ensure equitable access to health and care services within the community and hospitals.
  4. Develop healthy and sustainable places and communities through maximising the strength of the Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise (VCFSE) sector.
  5. Provide safe and accessible green spaces.
  6. Enable social connectivity and access to support such as Welcoming Spaces through delivering library, community and cultural services.
  7. Improve the availability of housing, including affordable housing, through delivering the Cheshire West and Chester Housing Strategy.
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Priority 6: Strengthen the role and impact of ill health prevention

  1. Support our communities to understand how to prevent and best manage long-term conditions, including heart failure, diabetes, and respiratory conditions.
  2. Increase mental health prevention and early help.
  3. Increase the uptake of learning disability annual health checks to enable early identification of problems and access to further support.
  4. Promote good health to keep people in work.
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Priority 7: Tackle racism, discrimination and their outcomes

  1. Increase cohesion in our communities through developing and delivering a Cheshire West and Chester Community Cohesion Strategy.
  2. Address inequalities in service access, experience and outcomes.
  3. Progress the social care and NHS workforce race equality standard (WRES) to ensure inclusive workplaces.
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Priority 8: Pursue environmental sustainability and health equity together

  1. Address climate change through delivering the Council climate emergency response plan 2025 – 2030 and Greener NHS plan 2030.
  2. Promote active travel through the implementation of integrated and sustainable transport options.
  3. Improve workforce wellbeing by maximising modern workforce principles and increasing active travel to work.
  4. Undertake more housing refurbishment and retrofit homes to make them more energy efficient and improve health.

© 2026 Cheshire West and Chester Council

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