Agenda item - Chair's Communications

The Chair of the Board will start the meeting with a short update on recent developments on health and wellbeing.

15.1    The Chair gave the following communications:

This is the last HWB meeting that Stephen Lightfoot will be attending as he is retiring as Chair of the NHS Sussex Integrated Care Board on 30 September 2025. I’d like to thank Stephen for his attendance at the Board and for all his positive contributions to the Board’s work and focus on improving population health.

We are looking at 4 issues today. We had a report on the city Pharmaceutical Needs Assessment at our last meeting. The final PNA is presented today for the Board to agree.

We also have a report on implementation of the local Joint Health & Wellbeing Strategy. The Board regularly considers reports that set out how we are performing in terms of delivering our strategic priorities, and today we will be focusing on the Dying Well domain.

In addition, we have an update on progress in implementing ‘Let’s Get Moving’ our Sport & Physical Activity Strategy. This update was requested by the Board when we initially considered the strategy in March last year.

Finally, we have a presentation on the development of the council’s Homelessness & Rough Sleeping Strategy. A draft Strategy is currently out for consultation, and we wanted to bring this to Board members’ attention as homelessness is such an important issue for partners across the city.

I also wanted to make members aware that we have a council by-election this Thursday, and today’s meeting is taking place in the official pre-election period. We are permitted to hold council meetings in the pre-election period, but we have to be even more careful than usual that we don’t use them to say anything that could be taken as supporting a particular political group. I would ask Board members to have regard to this when speaking today.