Member blog: Anna Hartley

I stared at the Environmental Health Officer who was on her knees shining a torch under the kitchen cabinets of a takeaway.  She had a good look and then gave it the all-clear much to the relief of the owners standing next to us.  This was a side of public health that I hadn’t seen much of, but I was very much enjoying my ‘back to the floor’ visit.  In the previous year, I had taken part in a health and safety inspection of the local football ground, been shown ‘rats the size of cats’ at a private bin yard, and door-knocked a vulnerable resident who was being targeted by local drug gangs.   

I had gone from being the Director of Public Health for Wakefield and having a small (but perfectly formed!) team of public health specialists with a workload that I knew inside out to becoming the Executive Director of Public Health and Communities in Barnsley.  

Starting my career working for a multi-purpose community centre in one of the most deprived areas of Leeds had brought home to me how important it is to communities that services are joined up and that people are listened to, so I had applied for the role in part because it brought together so many of the services that can transform residents’ lives.  

My remit now encompasses libraries, regulatory services, community safety, community development, licensing, domestic abuse and homelessness, plus all the usual public health programmes, and an in-house 0-19 service   

When public health moved to Barnsley Council in 2013 the leadership wanted it to be a public health council. Rather than ‘lift and shift’ the team, they created a distributed model with staff in every directorate. The DPH role reported directly to the CEO and in 2022, the communities directorate was moved into their portfolio. This was followed by regulatory services and licensing.   

This structure has a number of advantages; it embeds public health approaches right across the council and it also means that programmes are placed where they can have the greatest influence. For example, the physical activity team sit in the Regeneration and Growth Directorate where they can directly influence the built environment to support active travel.  

Examples of where we have been able to work collectively across the portfolio and with wider partners to improve health outcomes for our residents include working with the Book Trust on their  Reading Rights: Books Build a Brighter Future campaign, which calls for a national provision to make reading a part of daily life for every child in the first seven years of life.  

By working with them, we have assembled a task force of experts from across our services and the Borough – including health visitors, midwives, library services, GP practices, third-sector providers and Family Hub 0–19 Services. The pilot is based on the needs of the community, designing and testing a blueprint to ensure every child has the chance to experience the life-changing benefits of reading during their early years.  

Another example of this cross-department approach is ‘Hows Thi Ticker?’ (HTT), our LGC award-winning outreach blood pressure service. Using data and local insights, HTT was developed with the target audience at the heart of everything we did, from the name, the branding, the resources, the staff and the locations attended. Using GP data we were able to identify who and where we needed to target – middle-aged men in areas of deprivation. This simple yet effective service, which has now seen just under 10,000 people, has attracted a lot of media attention, national interest and even a visit from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government!  

So while the move to Barnsley has certainly been a challenge, by working with residents and partners across our portfolio of services we have really been able to make a tangible difference to residents’ health and wellbeing.