Further, their research found that leading active lives saves the NHS £540m on reduced GP visits and £780m on reduced mental health services usage.
It’s clear that supporting people to get active is the sustainable way to secure the future of our NHS and that this is key to creating healthy, active and long lives for everyone in England.
Physical activity and sport must therefore be at the heart of a prevention-first health system and, by default, integrating physical activity into our health and care systems will help achieve this.
Local work for a national ambition
Across England, we are seeing more and more collaboration between physical activity and the health and care sectors, but we need to keep moving this forward and at pace.
However, for this to work it must happen locally, starting at a community level. But what does this look like in practice? Let me share a couple of examples.
Take the work of wesport. The team there has brought the falls prevention programme – Fall-Proof – to communities across the West of England, including Bath, Bristol, parts of Somerset and South Gloucestershire.
This strength-and-balance campaign consists of easy-to-follow guides, a series of Move to Improve self-help cards and classes to prevent falls.
By building simple exercises into people's everyday lives and routines, this helps to keep them steady, strong and able to get out and about, improving their quality of life and opportunities.
The programme was made possible because of the system-wide advocacy and investment across the South West – from integrated care boards and from the voluntary and community sectors.
Elsewhere, Active Essex forged a strategic partnership with Essex County Council’s adult social care and community organisation, Sport For Confidence.
The aim is to create further opportunities for disabled people and for those living with long-term health conditions to be active and to engage in physical activity within their community in order to enable independence and to achieve wider outcomes.
The resulting Prevention and Enablement Model (PEM) was a range of system-led, co-designed and context-specific opportunities.
The programme also included an integrated falls-prevention programme, inclusive activity sessions in leisure centres and support for health and social care professionals to embed physical activity into their everyday practice.
Independent assessments of the programme by the University of Essex, found that the social value calculation was that for every £1 invested there was a £58 return of investment of social value.
And their insights revealed that people who accessed PEM services perceived themselves to have experienced benefits such as enhanced health, wellbeing, confidence, skills, independence and improved routine and structure to their days.
The success of the programme speaks for itself as it is now being rolled out county-wide through Reconnect.
A goal best achieved together
Ours is a complex challenge where collaboration is key, which is why – thanks to funding from Sport England – our network is working with specialist physical activity consultancy Move Consulting on a 15-month project that will support people living with, or at risk of, long-term health conditions to be more active.
Our Integrating Physical Activity Pathways for Health project will provide consistent, quality-assured models of delivery trusted by health and care colleagues to offer better assistance for those communities in most need.
Together, we aim to develop a framework of support that includes information, guidance and resources and tools that can be applied and used locally to help improve access to community-based activity.
By working closely with the health and care sector – including our partners NHS Horizons, the Richmond Group of Charities and CIMSPA – and in a sustained and systemic way that allows understanding, listening and acting on the needs of our communities, physical activity can be delivered alongside routine care as a key intervention to support our health.
So our mission is clear: working together to develop physical activity as a core component of our health and care systems and provide opportunities and programmes of support for those who need it most, so people feel empowered to lead more active, healthier and happier lives for longer.
