What does it mean?
Population services is about providing care that helps all children. It's about improving things for the entire population. It's about improving the fairness of care.
Why is it needed?
By improving health and healthcare at a population level, we can improve health for every child and all children. This is often expressed as "a rising tide lifts all boats".
What makes it happen?
Population health is often about background support for frontline care, and about services that improve things without always being obviously noticed.
Preventive care is a good example. One of CYPHP's services is about building resilience in schools, aiming to improve children's mental health and wellbeing before they might need help.
Similarly, improving the education and training of health professionals and helping them work more closely with each other in CYP health teams, should drive improvements in the quality of care, so that's another population level service.
Finally, we're committed to improving the equity (fairness) of care for children. So we have specific services for children and young people who need extra help. We're working specifically to provide better support for Looked After Children and Care Leavers.
How will we know it's better?
We'll be measuring the impact of population services directly and indirectly, and aim to show improvements in children's health, healthcare quality, and in the way that the health system works.