Champs Public Health Collaborative System Leadership Meeting | Key messages | November 2025

The Cheshire and Merseyside Directors of Public and Population Health met for their System Leadership meeting on Friday 14th November. You can read the key messages along with items of good news and gratitude here:

1. Dental health update – The Directors were updated by Yvonne Dailey, NHS England, on the recent surveys for dental health in children and adults. There are two further surveys planned for 2026/27 and 2027/28 and Directors will consider how these are best commissioned. Oral cancer data was also shared alongside an update on the Beyond supervised toothbrushing programme, All Together Smiling, which has made good progress with 41% of early years settings now taking part.
2. All Together Smoke Free update – Andrea Crossfield joined Directors to give a presentation on progress so far on this comprehensive programme, which aims to reduce smoking prevalence to 5% by 2030.  Key achievements include the Smoking Ends Here website, which has seen nearly 40,000 visitors, new segmentation and insight on smoking behaviours, the NHS and Local Government Smokefree Spaces Toolkit and advocacy around the Tobacco and Vapes Bill. There has already been a 14% increase in people quitting smoking in Cheshire and Merseyside and the forthcoming large-scale behaviour change campaign will continue to promote support for people to quit.
3. Population health update – A discussion was held around two recently published NHS documents, the medium-term planning framework and the strategic commissioning framework. Directors will work together with the intelligence and strategies available to develop the population health improvement plan.
4. UKHSA update – UKHSA is seeing earlier than usual outbreaks of flu this year in schools and care homes. Directors discussed the importance of the public and health and social care staff having the flu vaccination. Measles rates are still low following the school holidays which is positive news.
5. Good news and gratitude – The Directors shared the following items:
   1. Congratulations to Margaret Jones, Director of Public Health (DPH) in Sefton and Helen Bromely, DPH in Cheshire West and Chester on being nominated for ADPH awards. Margaret has been nominated for the CMOs’ National Impact Award and Helen for a Partnership Award. The winners will be announced at the ADPH conference on Friday 21 November.
   2. Congratulations also to Rory McGill, Sefton’s interim DPH, who has received an outstanding achievement award in the LGBTQ+ FLOWERS awards in Liverpool for his work on equality, diversity and inclusion across Sefton and the Liverpool City Region.
   3. Sefton has been shortlisted for excellent practice in commissioning for the Living Well Sefton Service.
   4. Ian Ashworth, NHS Director of Population Health, presented at last week’s NHS Providers Conference, sharing work on the NHS Prevention Pledge and All Together Fairer.
   5. Anjila Shah from UKHSA shared that there is now a single provider for the antiviral pathway. Anjila thanked Julie Kelly and her team at NHS Cheshire and Merseyside for their support.
   6. Andrew Furber, Regional DPH, shared that the North West had the most successful candidates among all regions for the public health leaders programme (formerly known as the Aspiring DPH programme).
   7. Warrington has been shortlisted for an HSJ award for their Living Well Hub.

Please email and queries regarding the key messages to champscommunications@wirral.gov.uk