A new partnership aiming to improve the health of 1.5 million people’s health has been launched, and includes Stevenage's new Nightlight Crisis Café.

Hertfordshire and West Essex Integrated Care Partnership (ICP) met for the first time last week to create plans to help individuals, communities and organisations.

It seeks to offer help to keep everyone as healthy as possible, influence other things that may impact health such as housing, employment and education, and deliver improvement in health and care.

This new partnership is aiming to build on partnership work that has already been under way.

This includes The Nightlight Crisis Café is another partnership that has already aimed to help those in need, as it provides support to anyone in need from 7pm to 1am every night of the year. It’s located by Stevenage railway station.

This café aims to prevent suicides and is part of wider work to do so.

Paul Burstow, chair of Hertfordshire and West Essex Integrated Care Board, said: “As well as the pressing issues we need to address here and now, we also need to look to the future. The actions we take now as a partnership can have a strong impact down the line.”

Public and voluntary sector organisations that have worked through the pandemic to provide support to those shielding, delivering vaccines, and to help increase vaccine uptake are also included in the partnership.

Councillor Richard Roberts, chair of the Integrated Care Partnership and leader of Hertfordshire County Council, said: “Evidence has shown that our homes, our finances, life opportunities along with access to public services have the biggest impact on our health and wellbeing.

"We can only address these issues for our residents if we work together effectively with a wide range of partners.

“This is even more important with the backdrop of a pandemic and the pressures faced by families due to increasing inflation, which all have a knock-on effect on health and wellbeing.”

The ICP’s first task is to draw up a care strategy to improve the health and care outcomes and experience of residents.