Peer review finds a solid public health base in Stoke-on-Trent
Stoke-on-Trent City Council has received positive feedback on its public health approach after a voluntary peer review by the Local Government Association examined how well the authority is carrying out its responsibilities for residents’ health and wellbeing. The review concluded that the council is fulfilling those duties well and has a strong foundation to keep improving outcomes across the city.
The findings matter because public health work at local authority level rarely turns on a single intervention. Instead, it depends on whether prevention is embedded in everyday decision-making, whether services work together, and whether health inequalities are treated as a central policy issue rather than a side concern. In Stoke-on-Trent, the review team judged that public health priorities were already influencing decisions effectively, with partnership working emerging as a notable strength.
A striking feature of the process was its breadth. Over three days in September, the peer review team interviewed council officers and external partners, spoke with more than 140 people, and examined more than 150 documents. That level of scrutiny gives weight to the conclusion that the city has established a credible platform for further improvement rather than a system starting from scratch.
The review did not present public health as a narrow departmental task. It pointed to joint working across Early Years, Children’s Services, and Public Health, alongside wider efforts to support and strengthen communities. In practical terms, this reflects an approach in which prevention begins early, community conditions are treated as health determinants, and coordination across services is used to reduce avoidable harm before it becomes entrenched.
One sentence in the findings captures the direction of travel plainly: the council is not only maintaining services, it is trying to shape healthier patterns across the city.
Partnership working and inequality reduction sit at the centre
The review identified a steadfast commitment to reducing health inequalities in Stoke-on-Trent. That is clinically and socially important, because inequalities are not abstract policy language; they translate into differences in chronic disease burden, childhood development, access to support, and long-term wellbeing. When local authorities align public health with education, family support, and community development, they can influence the conditions that drive risk long before people reach hospitals or specialist services.
The council’s work with external partners appears to have been a major factor in the positive assessment. Strong partnership systems can speed up referral pathways, improve the consistency of messages delivered to residents, and reduce duplication across services. They also give public health teams a better chance of reaching people whose needs are shaped by housing, income, early-life adversity, or social isolation rather than by medical factors alone.
The review also recognised the council’s internal culture of collaboration. Councillor Majid Khan, cabinet member for health integration and wellbeing, thanked everyone who took part and said the council had established a strong foundation and was making good progress in improving wellbeing and reducing health inequalities in Stoke-on-Trent. His comments place emphasis on ambition, but also on the practical value of cooperation across the system.
A second clear message came through the recommendations: the city should concentrate on a smaller number of key priorities to maximise impact. In local public health, breadth can dilute effect if it spreads staff time, leadership attention, and funding too thinly. Focusing resources on fewer targets can make implementation more measurable and more realistic, especially when authorities are trying to maintain momentum across multiple departments and partner organisations.
Three months to turn recommendations into an improvement plan
The review recommended that public health priorities stay highly visible across the wider system and that the council make the best use of available resources. Those recommendations reflect a familiar pressure in local government: even when a strategy is sound, execution can falter if priorities are not reinforced across management layers, partnership forums, and operational teams.
The next step is already defined. The city council will develop an improvement plan within the next three months to put the recommendations into practice. That timeline gives the authority a short runway to convert external feedback into a focused action plan, with attention likely to fall on governance, priority setting, and how the public health agenda is sustained across departments.
The review sits within the Local Government Association’s Public Health Improvement Programme and is funded by the Department for Health and Social Care. Stoke-on-Trent is only the second authority to take part in the voluntary peer review process, which gives the exercise added significance as an early test of how councils can use external scrutiny to strengthen public health delivery.
The report leaves Stoke-on-Trent in a constructive position. The city’s public health structure appears to be functioning well enough to support further gains, but the next phase will depend on discipline: narrowing priorities, protecting resources, and keeping prevention visible in decisions that are often driven by competing local pressures. The review offers praise, yet it also points to the everyday challenge of turning broad commitment into sustained, measurable improvement across communities.