PUBLIC health staff across all of Dorset are catching up with work which has been delayed during the last year because of the pandemic.

Some changes in ways of working, developed during the year, are likely to remain in place – especially online services.

The pan-Dorset joint public health board heard on Thursday how support for families with new children had, largely, continued face to face, while much of the work of the wellbeing and better health team, LiveWell Dorset, switched online, but still managed a series of successes.

Drug and alcohol services had also changed the way its teams worked, but had continued to reach out to those who needed help, despite the pandemic.

Board chair Cllr Karen Rampton praised staff for keeping services going but said she welcomed a greater return to individual contact: “I don’t think there is any substitute for face to face meetings…often it’s that coffee break moment which is so important to people’s mental health and wellbeing. Useful though online meetings are, it doesn’t replace personal contact,” she said. 

Director of public health Sam Crowe said he also welcomed the return to personal contact which he acknowledged many people needed.

He said that although key services had been maintained, even during the peak pandemic months, it had come at a cost of losing some routine work, such as some long-term health checks for children and the programme of health checks for adults, which had to be put on hold while staff were displaced to other duties.

The health director said that the year ahead would see many of those services resuming and staff had already made a good start in catching up with some of the work which they had been forced to postpone.

He welcomed the partnership work which had developed during the pandemic and improved community involvement, both of which, he said, the service was keen to continue.

The meeting voted to extend the Reach programme for drug and alcohol services, costing almost £5m a year across the county, taking its funding forward to the 2022-23 financial year. The initial contract was due to end in October 2022, but will now be extended until October 2023.

Mr Crowe said that although there was now a move towards normality for the public health service in many areas future need was still difficult to quantify and staff would be monitoring a number of key indicators, one of which was children’s readiness for starting school which had been good in the BCP area and a little less so in the Dorset Council area.

He said that staff still working on the pandemic had now largely moved to surveillance of covid infections and ensuring they could act quickly if there were outbreaks, especially of new strains.