Equitable Services Programme ——
Project title
Innovation Hub / Partnership
Enabling workstream
Project partners
Project dates
June 2024 to date (ongoing)
Project description
The Children and Young People’s Equitable Services Programme (ESP) is a project designed to improve how our services for children and young people are delivered. It focuses on working together with local services to reduce unfair differences in health and wellbeing that different children and young people experience, including inequity across service access, experience and outcome. The programme seeks to:
- Build Consensus through collective ambition and ownership of inequity reduction across CYP health and care services
- Enable action so services and commissioners work towards a continuous cycle of identifying and reducing inequities
- Sustain action and seek opportunities for improvement by developing mechanisms and resources for shared learning
Key achievements so far
A suite of resources and tools have been developed to offer clarity on equity and its importance, what data needs to be collected, how data helps us identify equity issues and using the QI approach to understand inequities and design solutions to address them. The team also delivered a range of webinars to help providers and commissioners understand how these resources can be practically implemented to achieve equitable service delivery.
Key deliverables include:
- Equity deep dives
- Establishment of suggested Minimum Equity Dataset
- Equity service standards checklists
- Equity data toolkit
- Health Equity Analysis tool developed by the Health Intelligence Team in response to clear need to compare service data with baseline population data to identify possible inequities
- Communities of practice guidance
- Testing of Insights repository
- Learning and development webinars
Case study:
The Starting Solids Quality Improvement Pilot:
The Starting Solids Team along with the Children and Learning Data team and Health Visitors worked with the Equitable Service Programme Lead to understand why people from the most deprived communities weren’t signing up to the sessions, and test ways to improve engagement with under-represented families, applying QI methods. By taking a systematic QI approach the team targeted the borough’s most deprived postcodes, increased trust with by contacting new parents directly, and shaped ideas with families, successfully increasing participation in those target groups.
Early results show real progress: attendance rose from 161 to 202 families between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025, with attendees from the 20% most deprived postcodes increasing from 14.3% to 39.1%.
The project continues to focus on reaching under-represented communities and ensuring every family can access support for giving their babies the healthiest start in life.
Upcoming milestones
Spring 2026: QI webinar series
From June 2026: Phase 3 roll out to wider teams/departments