The integration of health and social care provides a fantastic chance to improve services for children and ensure that they all get the best possible start in life.

We know ensuring children are healthy in the first few years can make all the difference to their general wellbeing and long-term health.  We also know health plays a key role in their ability to do well at school, which of course opens up all sorts of life benefits and will ultimately help the country cut its health and welfare costs.

From 2015 councils will be responsible for commissioning a variety of children's services for 0-5-year-olds including health visitors and family nurses.

Despite some misinformation and even scaremongering this doesn't mean that health visitors are suddenly going to become local government employees.

In fact most health visitors will remain NHS employees and terms of employment will not change as a result.

Equally misinformation abounds regarding local government's appetite to embrace early intervention through the vital work of health visitors.  We all therefore need to ensure that we push the positive way the sector sees this transfer.

In practice this means councils will be able to join up children's health with public health programmes, education, housing and social services to tackle the wider social and economic causes of poor health among children.

As new public health colleagues will testify, integrating services with local government will also give children's health practitioners a more powerful voice.

To ensure the transition goes smoothly, the LGA has taken a central role in establishing a joint national Children's Health and Wellbeing Partnership with ADCS, Solace, PHE, the Department of Health and NHS England.

Many councils have already started integrating services. For example, the likes of Blackburn and Darwen and East Riding have set up joint teams of health visitors, midwives and children's centre staff.  In Brighton and Hove they have gone one step further, with the city's health visitor service actually having been seconded to the council under a section 75 agreement.  The more we can evidence how this work provides better outcomes and is more cost effective during this period of uncertainty the better.

Councils are ready for this next big challenge; we look forward to welcoming the vital contribution of health visitors as we work together to improve the long-term health and life outcomes of children and young people, and we need to be saying this loud and clear.