Vital Signs


Performance against our Vital Signs in 2009/10

September 2010

NHS Lambeth is committed to sharing with our Lambeth residents and with our local partners the performance of local health services. In doing so we would wish to continue our ongoing dialogue with you, in order to help us inform the actions we should take to both improve the quality of local services and more generally to improve the health of Lambeth residents.

Lambeth is a borough with particularly high health needs and significant health inequalities. It is the 19th most deprived borough in the country and one of the most densely populated. The Borough has a very high rate of population mobility. These characteristics bring particular challenges to the effective delivery of high quality health services and in sustaining improvements in health. The Borough is rich in diversity and we seek to ensure health services address all of our communities’ health needs.

Delivering health improvement for Lambeth people is our clear ambition and we recognise that there are many areas where we have more to do. Lambeth has higher rates of mortality compared to other parts of London and to the country as a whole, however life expectancy is increasing and this inequality is narrowing overall for circulatory diseases and cancer.

Whilst recognising that, through engagement with our communities and through working with all our partners, we can do much more to improve upon our performance, we are also proud of what we have achieved to date. We are particularly pleased that we have been able to deliver marked improvements in a number of areas, such as in access to primary care services, childhood immunisations and in reducing the rate of teenage pregnancies, all of which have proved extremely challenging over a number of previous years. We continue to ensure that our patients who have a stroke receive the right care, in the right place at the right time, performing well above the London and England averages. For the second consecutive year our reproductive and sexual health services have screened the highest proportions of our population between the ages of 15 and 24 nationally, as part of our drive to reduce the rate of sexually transmitted infections.

For 2010/11 we have introduced a transformation programme to drive and deliver improvements in areas that have a high health risk for our residents. The areas where we are performing less well comparatively are known to us and have been included as specific areas of focus within this programme.

On our website you will find:

For a copy of any of the above reports, or to contact us with a question or comment, please send an email to enquiries@lambethpct.nhs.uk

Documents