Healthy Lifestyle Services Review

Overview

Outline

Birmingham City Council would like your views on our lifestyle services, which includes:
a. Stop Smoking services
b. NHS Health Checks
c. Healthy Eating/Weight Management
d. Physical Activity
e. Health Trainers

The focus of this engagement exercise is to enable you to outline what works well and how we could improve our services in the future. We are just beginning a full review and your comments will help us decide how to improve things. Regardless if you have or have not used our lifestyle services before we would like to know what you think to allow us to make improvements. There will be formal consultation events on any proposed changes, but your early engagement will help develop initial proposals and service delivery models. This is in addition to the budget consultation that will also influence future commissioning models.
 

Core purpose

To help people live healthier for longer by addressing the factors that influence their health and wellbeing and simplify the referral pathway for people with multiple needs to access services.

Introduction

The transfer of a number of significant Public Health responsibilities to Birmingham City Council as a result of the Health & Social Care Act 2012, together with the establishment of the Health & Wellbeing Board provide an opportunity to review and refresh the local strategic approach to commissioning lifestyle services.

The traditional approach to improving lifestyles in the City has been to focus on individual service areas that do not necessarily complement each other.  This has led to specific programmes for stopping smoking, healthy weight and others.  In the more deprived areas of Birmingham many of these programmes and services target the same groups(s) of people (e.g. a person that is quitting smoking may also benefit from physical activity or weight management services).  Moving towards an integrated approach that helps people tackle different issues may help ensure services are more easily accessible.

Overwhelming evidence suggests that people find lifestyle changes incredibly hard to make, particularly if there are other underlying basic social needs that have not been addressed or a person experiences poor mental wellbeing.  Therefore it is important to ensure that services are easily accessible and address the barriers that our diverse Birmingham population faces.

The review process

For the purposes of the review, ‘lifestyle services’ include the following:
a. Stop Smoking services
b. NHS Health Checks programme
c. Healthy Eating/Weight Management
d. Physical Activity
e. Health Trainers

It is important to gain a broader understanding of the service from both a providers and the service user’s perspective to help ensure our future model is reflective of the local need. Please help us by letting us know your thoughts on current lifestyle services and what you think is important for the future by answering the online questionnaire.