Published guidance on local strategy development
- 'Let's get moving: A physical activity handbook for developing local programmes' - Faculty of Public Health and National Heart Forum. 2001.
Designed to assist in the development of local policies, strategies and programmes to promote physical activity. It offers guidance for developing partnerships, criteria for deciding priority groups and interventions, advice on audit and evaluation, examples of good practice, and sources of further information.
NICE evidence on physical activity
A summary of the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) evidence of effectiveness of public health interventions for increasing physical activity among adults.
National
- Incentives to employers to encourage walking and cycling to work should be introduced and the provision of existing locally based travel plans enhanced and encouraged through local authority grants.
- The development of a cadre of physical activity facilitators, attached to primary care delivery agents should be established.
Regional
- Incentives must be introduced for local authorities to preserve playing fields and other open spaces and to address quality and safety issues and concerns among users, and to introduce safe play environments within open spaces, including ranger and park keeping schemes and safe walking environments. This can be coordinated with local schemes to promote walking for health by signed routes, maps, local publicity and advice from health professionals.
Local NHS
- Brief interventions to promote physical activity should be a routine part of primary care using referral to properly trained and resourced physical activity and lifestyle coaches.
- Interventions that encourage walking and do not require attendance at a facility are the most likely to lead to sustainable increases in overall physical activity, and should be encouraged.
- There is strong evidence that individually adapted health behaviour change programmes are effective in increasing physical activity levels. These should therefore be used in primary care.
- Social support interventions in community settings are effective in increasing physical activity and therefore should be encouraged.
Schools
- School based physical education should be maintained and enhanced.
The full publication can be downloaded from:
http://www.publichealth.nice.org.uk/page.aspx?o=505281
Interventions that use the environment to encourage physical activity
There is a clear link between physical inactivity and health. The extent of this link is set out in publications such as the Chief Medical Officer's report At least five times a week (Department of Health 2004).
NICE published 'Interventions that use the environment to encourage physical activity - evidence review' in September 2006 to further our knowledge of 'what works'.
NICE's findings call into two categories, covering two different approaches:
- Interventions that made physical and policy changes to the environment
- Interventions where the environment was used to host a prompt to take an active rather than a sedentary choice, for example, stairs versus escalator use.
The main findings are:
- A combination of physical changes to working practices, policies and the physical environment appears to encourage adults to maintain their vigorous physical activity and fitness. Although NICE urges caution as there is a shortage of well designed studies showing what is effective.
- The development of new cycling and walking paths appears to encourage the use of the paths. Again NICE urges caution due to the lack of high quality long-term studies.
- Using the environment as a point of active or sedentary choice (e.g. using stairs not the lift) with written media (e.g. stair posters, riser banners on steps) can have short-term effect for up to 3 months.
However, there are few clear cut conclusions drawn of what works over the long-term.
For the full report visit: http://www.nice.org.uk/page.aspx?o=366133