STRONG AND INFLUENTIAL LEADERSHIP FOR PHYSICAL ACTIVITY
Physical activity and sport have a significant role to play across the systems of our region to create a higher quality of life for communities that need it the most in Northumberland and Tyne & Wear.
Our role is to support the leadership of policy, legislation and system change to ensure this happens.
We are building networks and alliances that champion the contribution that physical activity and sport can have across local strategic priorities. Here is an extensive, but not exhaustive list of recent work.
We have created, co-ordinated and chaired a small strategic steering group, comprising of ourselves, two senior leads from South Tyneside Council’s public health team, and the Service Manager (Early Help) for South Tyneside Council’s Adult Services department. The group meets bi-monthly and aims to improve outcomes for residents across South Tyneside, including improving health, reducing falls, and increasing levels of physical activity.
In 2021, strategic partners in Newcastle highlighted real concerns for young people residing in the Outer West areas of the city, specifically linked to rising poverty levels; rising unemployment; a rise in crime levels; lower educational attainment; and lower general life aspirations as well as poor health and wellbeing outcomes.
In response to these concerns, Rise has facilitated system-led discussions with strategic stakeholders to embed physical activity and sport as a driver to help tackle these wider issues. This includes engagement with local authority, education, primary care network and local VCSE leaders, who are now committed to developing co-designed interventions that are driven by the needs of the community e.g. by ensuring that youth voice is at the heart of future decision-making in this area.
As part of this approach, Rise has in-principle agreements secured to support local schools in the Outer West area of Newcastle to embed the Creating Active Schools Framework within their whole school improvement plans. Going forward into 2022-2023, this curriculum-focussed work will now complement the wider systems work that is being developed, to ensure that children and young people’s needs are adequately met via sustainable interventions.
The NHS Ageing Well long-term plan acknowledges the inextricable link between physical activity and wide-ranging factors which are crucial aspects for wellbeing in older adults. Local Primary Care teams are beginning to explore how activity (physical and social) can play a fundamental role in areas such as anticipatory care and preventative health management. With this in mind, we have been developing a multi-agency, community-based physical and social activity intervention which is facilitated by Primary Care healthcare professionals and local VCSE partners.
The mixed-approach model combines proactive case-finding with activity-conscious social prescribing, underpinned by evidence-based physical activity messaging, embedded within the existing primary care and community link pathways in the west end of Newcastle and in parts of Gateshead. Participants are supported to improve physical ability and resilience over a 16-week period, with the aim of reducing the likelihood of worsening health and related dependence on health and care services. In addition, a workforce development offer has been coordinated to improve shared knowledge, skills, and confidence to deliver brief physical activity messaging across local health care channels.
Play streets have been discussed with several of the local authorities in the region and Rise has connected the authorities together and shared details of the Playing Out charity in order to create a network where discussions can establish the best options for implementing play streets in an area.
During 2021-22 we have continued to develop our understanding of young adults and their barriers to participating in physical activity.
We have undertaken youth voice sessions with young people aged 16+ in a number of our local authority areas and in various settings including alternative education providers, youth provision and FE colleges. We have received diverse feedback and insight into the barriers including cost, facilities, lack of confidence, lack of support and lack of fun.
From the insight gathered we continue to collaborate with partners including education establishments, local authorities, town councils and VCSE organisations to address these barriers and make the ability to be more physically active more accessible to all young people.
Throughout the year, we have continued to support the Active Sunderland Board (including fulfilling the role of Vice-Chair), a key strategic group which pulls together a wide variety of partners across the city to work together to increase levels of physical activity. A newly-created Living Well Board launched in 2021 as a sub-group of the Sunderland Health & Wellbeing Board, and it was agreed that we would be the representative for the Active Sunderland Board on that group and seek to influence the wider system in relation to the role physical activity can play in improving wider social and health outcomes.
Throughout 2021-2022, Rise worked in collaboration with our School Games Organisers (SGO) network to ensure our School Games programme adapted quickly to the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions and provided a successful Activ5 programme combined with virtual events to ensure an inclusive programme was designed to meet the needs of all children across Northumberland and Tyne & Wear.
The new school year in September 2021 saw a significant change in the focus of our programme in which Rise worked with a number of strategic partners, including our SGO network, school leads and local authority education leads to develop a ‘transitional approach’ to target the most vulnerable children and young people.
Rise has been instrumental in developing the new national Active Partnership (AP) Strategic Networking Group for Early Years, which has now also incorporated an additional maternity group.
This has allowed Rise and other APs to share good practice and ideas and is beginning to develop opportunities for collaborative working at a national scale. For example, 5 APs (including Rise) from the maternity group have worked collaboratively with the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) to build a business case to bid for Sport England ‘This Girl Can’ investment for a project whereby the NCT’s successful Walk & Talk programme can be expanded into diverse and inactive communities using the in-depth local knowledge of APs. If successful, in 2022-2023, this project will support new mothers’ activity levels and their mental health where it is needed most and will work to ensure diverse groups benefit in five areas nationally, including Northumberland and Tyne & Wear. This project aims to act as a pilot to precede a national roll out.
We were invited onto the Foundation Trust’s Prevention Board and have enjoyed working with them to help shape and support the delivery of their Health and Wellbeing Strategy, including advocating the role that physical activity can play in improving outcomes for their staff and patients. In addition to being involved in the Prevention Board, we also sit on a number of the sub-groups such as those focusing on ‘workforce health’ and ‘healthy environments’ and have been supporting these groups to provide more opportunities for people to be physically active.
We are part of the Creating Active Schools Framework, which was developed by Yorkshire Sport Foundation (YSF) in collaboration with other education stakeholders. This is designed to sustainably embed physical activity throughout the school so that everyone understands its benefits and can easily implement it into their practice.
In October 2021, our Children & Young People Development Manager was seconded part time for 12 months to support YSF in the role of National CAS Programme Manager. This role includes the responsibility for overseeing the national pilot programme, and supporting 18 other Active Partnerships as well as some targeted local authorities involved in the initial pilot of the programme and Sport England’s Local Development Pilots.
The learning from this role is already helping to focus Rise’s priorities in working with local schools in locations where insight indicates high inactivity levels combined with poor health and wellbeing outcomes.
In collaboration with Northumbria NHS Healthcare Trust, Rise was instrumental in developing a video to promote walking in pregnancy as a simple and accessible form of exercise.
This has now been shared widely across the region and is now used extensively across our six local authority areas by a range of NHS, local authority and VCSE partners and organisations. It has also been adopted by Northumbria NHS Foundation Trust, who signpost pregnant mothers to this information via their website.
Following the launch of our video, our relationship with Northumbria NHS Foundation Trust midwifery services was greatly enhanced, which led to the development of a pilot of a walking group in a deprived area of North Tyneside, working in collaboration with the YMCA. On the back of this pilot, Rise are now working to strategically align the learning from this work to develop more effective connections with North Tyneside Council and their postnatal physical activity offers.
We have been delighted to support Sunderland City Council’s Public Health department as they adopted the Local Authority Declaration on Healthy Weight. The declaration presents the opportunity for local authorities to lead local action and demonstrate good practice in adopting a systems approach to tackling obesity and promoting the health and well-being of communities, and supporting residents to be as active as they possibly can be.
We were also asked to support North Tyneside Council’s approach to their Healthy Weight Declaration, providing comments and advice in relation to their 2022-2024 Action Plan.
