Fitter for Health™
showcased at NHS conference
Engage2Change Directors were proud to be present at the launch of the landmark NHS Challenge at the Emirates Stadium in London on Tuesday, July 13.
More than 150 NHS Chief Executives from up and down the country attended the prestigious event where they were joined by Olympic Gold Medallist Jonathan Edwards. They heard Dr Steve Boorman, NHS Health and Wellbeing Lead Reviewer, challenge health service leaders to use the “inspirational power” of the 2012 Olympic Games to support and encourage 2,012 staff in each NHS community to engage in sport or physical activity by 2012.
Spelling out the benefits of a fitter, healthier workforce, and speaking on behalf of NHS Chief Executive Sir David Nicholson, Dr Boorman pointed to the NHS Health and Wellbeing Review. This revealed that sickness absence costs the NHS approximately £1.7bn per year and that improving NHS staff health and wellbeing could reduce sickness absence by up to a third – resulting in productivity improvements of up to £555m per year.
Our Directors Lynn and Richard May and Andy Cumming accompanied Len Richards, Chief Executive of Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, to the event where he praised the Fitter for Health™ campaign which we have been piloting with his Trust for more than six months.
Len told the audience: “There are many ways of building Fitter for Health™ into the way we do business, the way we partner with other organisations, the way we engage with our own staff and the way we engage with the community. These are the sort of advantages and benefits that I think we get from a programme like this.”
He also presented a video diary of his punishing training regime for his own personal challenge - to create sponsorship opportunities for his charity Improving Chances, which is raising money for healthcare facilities in a remote part of Western Uganda where neonatal and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the world.
Len has set himself a series of 10 tough physical endurance tests for which he is seeking sponsorship in the run up to 2012, culminating with an assault on Mount Kilimanjaro. This year has seen him complete the gruelling 10k Mersey Tunnel Run and the Northern Rock Cyclone, a 66k bike ride in the North East of England, and he is now in training for the Coast to Coast bike ride from Workington to Sunderland. He will be joined by a team of colleagues from Wirral Hospital who are also supporting the charity.
Len confesses on his video that he was not always a fan of exercise. Seven years ago, at the age of 40, he weighed nearly 19 stone (116 kgs), struggled to climb up stairs and felt “not too well.” Having decided to lose weight, he embarked on a programme of running which he does, three times a week, to this day.
He says of his life changing decision: “It’s about trying to be a role model to others. I think I do fit the bill in that Change4Life category. My view is if I can do it anyone can do it. I have never been particularly sporting but I do a lot of exercise and I do feel better for it. I want to be a role model to my children, to my family and I think there is a real role for the NHS to be a role model within society around fitness activity.”
Len’s last challenge this year will be the Great North Swim across Lake Windermere in September when, he says, he “expects the water to be cold”!
Explaining social marketing
to non-marketers
Engage2Change was out in force yesterday (November 26, 2009), at the Children’s Health 09 conference at Westminster’s QEII Conference Centre.
It was a great opportunity for us to talk to a very wide range of non-marketers – including auditors, public health professionals, educational psychologists, deputy head teachers – about social marketing.
The evidence, from two packed-out seminars that we ran and feedback at the exhibition stand, is that they’ve heard about social marketing, and that they’re a sceptical bunch. And understandably so, given the flavour-of-the month approach to such things of the not-so-distant past.
Some felt that social marketing seems a bit short-termist, others wondered how different this is to traditional health promotion. Nearly everyone wondered how to use social marketing to achieve their aims.
Some good questions, and a perfect opportunity for team E2C to wax lyrical about how the principles of social marketing can be universally applied.
Commercial principles, public settings
We explained the principles, tried and tested in the cut and thrust of the commercial sector. We demonstrated how they can be used to move people into taking action for individual or societal good, with various examples from our, and others’ projects.
Building in sustainability
We explained how social marketing is cyclical. How one piece of work should inform the next and how social marketing is often about shaping sustainable services. Market research usually identifies how existing services might need to be altered, or new services devised in order to answer the needs of these users.
Commercial organisations use marketing in an ongoing sense, rather than project-by-project, and many enlightened public sector organisations have recognised this too.
Beating them at their own game
We know that the principles work because commercial organisations, judged daily on the profitability of these measures by their shareholders, continue to use them. Cigarette, alcoholic drinks, fast food and confectionery companies use marketing expertly, so why shouldn’t we use it to tackle the issues often caused by over-use or misuse of their products?
Now that social marketers have adopted these tricks, to apply the principles for social ‘good’, we’re seeing success, in our projects and others’. Good marketing works and will continue to work, and there’s no better current example than the Department of Health’s Change4Life.
Change4Life, a change for the better
As if to underline everything we were saying, an excellent presentation from Sian Jarvis, Director General of Communications at the Department of Health explained to delegates how Change4Life is probably the best example so far of how well social marketing can work.
The clever campaign, devised by agency M Saatchi, has shifted the attitudes of a generation of parents about the health of their family in a way that just hasn’t been achieved before.
Crucially, Change4Life listened to families, heard that they didn’t fully understand the scale of the issue (30% of kids are overweight, but only 5% of parents thought their child was overweight) and discovered that they didn’t like the way that the state and healthcare profession talked to them about it.
A change in the ‘tone of voice’ was instrumental. The message is friendly, persuasive and clear and the brand is strong. So strong in fact that nationally, it has attracted 170 partners – public and private – including some very big consumer brands. Locally, over 25,000 partners have signed up to work with Change4Life.
For more information…
Please get in touch. We’d be delighted to talk to you about how social marketing could be applied in your organisation. We can also recommend an excellent book called ‘Social Marketing: Why should the devil have all the best tunes’, by Gerard Hastings.