UK physical activity guidelines: developing options for future communication and surveillance

This work was Commissioned by Department of Health and partner

Co-Creating Recommendations to Redesign and Promote Strength and Balance Service Provision

Background: Awareness of physical activity guidelines are low, particularly the “forgotten guidelines” of strength and balance. Increasing awareness of guidelines, but also of appropriate local services that can be utilised, is an important step towards active ageing. Co-creation can inform tailored service provision to potentially increase uptake and adherence. The aim was to co-create recommendations to redesign and promote local leisure services, emphasising strength and balance activity provision. Method: Twenty-four ageing and older adults engaged in 10 co-creation workshops. Workshops consisted of interactive tasks, and fieldwork tasks were undertaken externally. Data were collected using field notes, worksheet tasks and facilitator reflections and were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Results: Retention and adherence rates were 92% and 85%. Co-creators cited group cohesion, scientific input from experts and perceived knowledge development as enjoyable elements of the process. Four key themes emerged from analysis: (1) localised strategies for awareness raising, (2) recruitment of volunteer champions to increase uptake and maintenance, (3) accessibility of activities, including what they are and when they are, and (4) evaluation of impact. Conclusion: This has been the first study, to our knowledge, to utilise co-creation for informed leisure service provision improvement. Future work should aim to implement these recommendations to ascertain what impact these themes might make

The development of a scale to aid caseload weighting in a community mental health team for older people

Background: Community mental health teams (CMHTs) receive high numbers of referrals and staff who work in these teams are under constant pressure to take on more patients. Local CMHT staff expressed the need for a more accurate way to represent their workload than purely reporting numbers of clients on their caseload. Aims: The project aimed to develop a brief case weighting scale (CWS) specifically to rate cases in CMHTs for older people in Leicestershire. Methods: An eight-item scale was designed to include the main aspects of a client case that contribute to increased work input by CMHT members. A multiple regression model was used to assign different weightings to each of the items in order to predict time spent on the case over a four week period. Results: The items on the scale together ‘‘accounted for’’ 58% of the variation in time spent on client cases. The re-test and inter-rater reliability of the scale were shown to be good. Agreement with the HoNOS 65þ was investigated. Conclusions: The CWS can be used to rate both current client cases and new referrals following first assessment, and aims to provide CMHT staff with a useful and useable indicator of their clinical workload