In June 2008 the Eastern Development Centre, working with a range of regional and national partners released a JSNA ‘Quality Assurance Toolkit’ that was aimed at people and teams involved in individual JSNAs across the Eastern Region, and which asked questions about a number of different aspects of with JSNA.

Some of the key issues identified in this process for JSNAs in the Eastern Region were:

• Defining clearly how JSNA fits with other statutory needs assessments such as Children and Young People’s Plans and Economic needs assessments
• The importance of producing clear and short executive summaries for each JSNA that outline key findings and provide a simple and easy to understand ‘narrative’ for the place that both partners and the public can easily relate to and work around
• Including of a wider range of partners than just the upper tier local authorities and Primary Care Trusts. I.e. District and Borough Councils, LSPs etc
• The difficulty associated with genuinely engaging with the public in a long term and participative manner, and feeding findings into the local JSNA.
• Clearly linking JSNA to the wider policy environment i.e. World Class Commissioning.
• The importance of long term clear data sharing arrangements between partners.

The content of these web pages (including Better Commissioning) have been tailored to address the key issues identified from that process.