Agenda item

To present the Active North Tyneside Annual Report 2018-19.

A report was received which introduced the Active North Tyneside Annual Report 2018-19 which was presented by officers from the Sport and Leisure service.

The purpose of Active North Tyneside was to improve the health and wellbeing of residents and reduce health inequalities across the borough. 

To do this, there were four key objectives:

i.          To increase levels of physical activity;

ii.         To increase healthy weight in adults and children across the borough;

iii.        To strengthen communities and support residents to support each other; and

iv.        To support people to improve their mental health.

Active North Tyneside aimed to tackle the health inequalities by specifically encouraging uptake in the 20% most deprived areas in the borough and also by directly targeting vulnerable groups, for example, young men and women who were not in education, employment or training, looked after children and troubled families.

Active North Tyneside was made up of a wide variety of different programmes, about 30 or so projects, some focussing on physical activity for all, some on targeted weight management intervention and some on recruiting volunteers to support and advise their own peers and communities to make healthier lifestyle choices.  All the programmes were FREE.  The programmes were funded by Public Health and delivered by the Authority’s sport and leisure service.

Since its inception in 2015, Active North Tyneside had delivered numerous community-based programmes and had worked with many external groups and organisations, all of which had supported the Authority in developing the Active North Tyneside programme.

The Annual report focused on the positive delivery of initiatives in the last year that had encouraged residents at risk of poor health to become more active, and highlighted areas of achievement as well some learning from those initiatives that had not been so successful. The sport and leisure service continued to work with Public Health colleagues alongside other groups and organisations to promote and develop the programme.

During the last 12 months the sport and leisure service had delivered a number of interventions to increase physical activity and maintain healthy weight.  The teams had healthy conversations on a daily basis covering lifestyle habits such as smoking, alcohol and getting more activity.  The teams was skilled in assessing customers’ readiness for change and giving them the right advice to support this.  There was also input from clinical staff, including public health nurses and a Dietitian. This brought a breadth of knowledge and experience to the team, and experience and ensured that all the interventions were evidence-based.

One of the objectives of Active North Tyneside was to reduce health inequalities and target those most in need.  The service also provided a number of offers to target groups including Looked After Children, Troubled Families, Young Carers and Foster Carers.  These offers were generally for free or greatly reduced cost activities across the sport and leisure service.  There was also a programme of activities specifically for disabled customers included swimming, trampolining and archery.  Although not directly funded through the programme, these offers fitted perfectly with the Active North Tyneside agenda and offered another element of support.  The teams had also fostered excellent relationships with colleagues and partners. 

The key recommendations and conclusions to the report were:

•           Staying focussed marketing through tools such as social media;

•           Ensuring the right imagery and language was used to resonate with customers;

•           Keeping strong relationships with partners; and

•           Most importantly – listening and engaging with existing and potential customers to ensure that whatever was done by the Authority could make a difference.

Making change at times had taken longer than anticipated and the evidence collected demonstrated how difficult it was to initially get people on board.  However, once engaged, the programmes were really impactful and the teams were confident they were attracting a good proportion of target customers, as illustrated through the Mosaic profiling system.     

The teams were delivering on the vision of Our North Tyneside Plan to help residents stay healthy and independent.  They wanted to continue to listen to, and, understand their residents’ needs to ensure they served them in the best way possible.         

Wellbeing remained central to Active North Tyneside.  All programmes had this at their heart and teams across the board were skilled in having healthy conversations.  The Active North Tyneside teams were looking forward to working with the Public Health team and wider colleagues to further develop their role on delivering public health priorities and the prevention agenda.

Members of the sub-committee asked a series of questions of officers. During questioning members considered areas including:-

a)         The opportunities available for school breakfast club use of IT software in the form of Tablets.

b)         Identifying those younger and older people with loneliness and isolation issues via clinicians in addition to those attending organised activities and weight management programmes.

c)         The feasibility of gathering statistics by ward in respect of health inequalities in relation to the uptake in the most deprived areas in the borough to facilitate the next steps in identifying specific needs.

d)         The work of Community Champions as peer mentors via family gateways.

e)         Options available for promoting vegetarian type meals in relation to carbon management in consultation with health colleagues.

The Chair thanked officers for their presentation. 

It was agreed that the Active North Tyneside Annual Report 2018-19 be noted.