On Wednesday 4th May, we attended the first annual Elevate conference. This conference included seminars and an exhibition that aimed to tackle the issue of inactivity in the UK and provide a forum for cross-sector debate on physical activity, health and wellbeing.
The seminar programme was divided into three streams: physical activity for health and wellness; inclusivity: strategies to increase participation; and future performance. We attended the sessions in the health and wellness stream which began with a session on ‘Physical Activity as Preventive Care’.
Speaking at this session was Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health. Sally Davies started by asking the question: ‘what can we do to get people to listen to us about physical activity?’ She stated that only 1 in 5 young people between the ages of 5 and 18 are getting their recommended amount of exercise and many adults too are not achieving the recommended amount of physical activity. She stated that exercise is an investment in reducing our risk of a number of diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease and cardiovascular disease, and somehow we need to communicate this in a way that causes behaviour change.
Sally Davies stressed the importance of health professionals in getting the public active and recognised that many health professionals don’t have the training to promote physical activity. She said we are missing an opportunity because 1 in 4 people said they would do exercise if they were advised to do so by a health professional. She said messages can be as simple as ‘just walk’. Additionally, we need to utilise all professionals including teachers and those in the work place and determine how best to use elite athletes as role models. She also explained that we need to ensure we have a safe environment for physical activity so the public feels confident if they decide to go cycling, jogging or running.
We then heard from Justin Varney, the Interim Deputy Director for Health and Wellbeing at Public Health England. Justin started his presentation by stressing the importance of physical activity stating that only 10% of diseases can be prevented by medicine whilst 40% can be prevented by lifestyle changes including being more active. He also said that physical inactivity is one of the top ten reasons for death in the UK and that adults are 20% less active now than they were in the 1960s. He highlighted the fact that the UK is less active compared to other counties with 63% of the UK’s population being inactive. He explained that one of the challenges in encouraging people to be more inactive is that the benefits are not immediate, it takes years for people to see the benefits and this doesn’t motivate people to get active now.
Justin Varney informed attendees that Public Health England published their report Everybody Active, Every Day and it provided an evidence-based approach to tackling inactivity with there being four focus areas: 1) Active society – creating a social movement, 2) Moving professionals – activating networks of professionals, 3) Active environments, – creating the right spaces and 4) Moving at scale – scaling up the interventions that make us active. He ended by saying that there is a lot of evidence out there about the benefits of physical activity and what works, and what we need now is to stop writing documents but read them and focus on implementation.
These two presentations set the scene for the rest of the day with presentations and sessions that followed focusing on examples and ideas on how to get people more active, case studies on the benefits of physical activity (e.g. for cancer patients, diabetics etc) and the role of technology. The presentations that we found most interesting were:
1. Research and evidence into physical activity and non-communicable diseases by David Terrace of the Richmond Group of Charities. In his presentation David explained that the Richmond Group is a coalition of twelve of the leading health and social care organisations in the voluntary sector and they aim to build on each other’s expertise to get more people active. They worked together on a one year project to map out the work each of their charities do with respect to physical activity and to draw together all the evidence on physical activity so they could develop a joint approach to tackling inactivity. Two of the key areas they wanted to focus on were training health professionals and addressing the barriers to physical activity.
They carried out some work to examine the relationships between inactivity and long term conditions and their key findings were:
– Even people who are incapacitated want to be active
– Many people felt that exercise and physical activity were “not for people like me”
– The main barriers were: pain, fatigue and breathlessness
They found that what worked in getting people active was:
– Positive but realistic messages
– Speaking to people’s aspirations
– Messages coming from a credible person (health professional)
– Empathy
– Encouraging people to gradually build up
Unpopular physical activity messages:
– Made assumptions about inactive people
– Too many messages (message fatigue)
– Were not relatable
– Challenged their lived existence
Another issue they found was that people associated negative things with exercise and physical activity – “pain” and “stress”
2. Implementing physical activity into the healthcare system by William Bird. This was a really good presentation that started with an explanation of the biology of physical inactivity. It was explained that if we’re inactive for too long we start do develop chronic inflammation which leads to many health conditions. Chronic inflammation is the key issue when it comes to inactivity. When we’re physically active we reduce our visceral fat which is what creates the inflammation and when we’re active it’s the visceral fat that we lose first. This means that weight loss is not a good marker of success for physical activity.
They have found if you get physical activity right, you start to get everything right as it seems to be the gateway for further behaviour change, like eating healthily.
William Bird then asked: how do we get inactive people active? We take away all the barriers and stop using words like “physical activity” and “health”. He then explained an extremely successful approach that they used – Beat the Street –which turned a town into a game. They got schools and workplaces involved in a fun, free walking game for the whole community.It created a social norm around walking and cycling, and was very successful in getting a whole community active with 23,992 playing the game and leading to the community walking and cycling 306,599 miles.
3. OurPath by Chris Edison. This was a very interesting talk that demonstrated how technology can be used to encourage people to get physically active.OurPath uses IT to get inactive people at risk of developing type two diabetes active. It is a 6 week behaviour change programme to reduce diabetes risk. It uses seven methods of change – mentors, group support, monitoring, goals, routine, information timelines (giving people the right information at the right time) and stress management. This programme uses the latest technology and tools – a mobile and desktop app, wireless scales, a social media-like community and an activity tracker. It focuses on behaviour, nutrition and wellbeing.
4. Cancer and Physical Activity by Robert Thomas. In this presentation we learnt that exercise can help alleviate the common symptoms that cancer patients experience after treatment and that if patients take part in exercise as soon as they are diagnosed they experience less fatigue and are better able to deal with treatment. It was explained that research has shown that 2-3 hours of exercise per week makes patients less likely to have a recurrence and it helps patients overcome depression.
We really enjoyed Elevate and thought it covered a variety of very relevant and important issues and look forward to attending next year.
