Public Health England launch guidance to help health practitioners increase physical activity

Health Matters: Getting every adult active everyday, released this week, looks at how health practitioners and local authorities can increase physical activity.

Health Matters provides health professionals working to get more adults physically active with a toolkit and the latest report also has guidance for local authorities with the same objective.

The guidance also takes in to account the focus of Sport England’s new strategy, Towards an Active Nation which specifically encourages physical activity providers to get the inactive and underrepresented groups to be active. As a result it has identified four areas where local and national bodies can take action to get people active:

1. Active Society - People are more likely to be active if it is seen as ‘normal’, and if their friends and peers are also active.
2. Moving professionals - 1 in 4 patients would be more active if advised by a GP or nurse.
3. Active environments - Our homes, workplaces and local environments should be designed to encourage physically active.
4. Moving at scale - Positive change needs to happen at every level, in every region and be measurable.

The resource also contains advice on how the sport and leisure sector - a key focus of the Sport and Recreation Alliance’s and ukactive’s physical activity and health report launched in July 2016-can engage with inactive adults.

The latest release of Health Matters comes as PHE warns that people in the UK are around 20% less active now than they were in the 1960s, and that if that trends continues, the nation will be 35% less active by 2030.

Watch this video to find out more about Health Matters:

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