Community

Healthy Peterborough!

A year-long programme is targeting a different health condition each month, each offering advice and support aimed at alleviating illness or preventing it altogether. The Moment magazine talked to some of the key people behind the campaign to find out how it came about, and how it can help us become healthier, happier, and enjoy greater quality of life

Councillor Diane Lamb
Peterborough City Council Cabinet Member for Public Health

How did Healthy Peterborough come about?
I have been involved with health, wellbeing, and public health for quite a number of years, and my aim has always been to raise the profile of health in the city and the rural areas. I’ve been in the NHS all my working life, so I suppose it was natural for me to pursue that. I started engaging the councillors, because I was also getting more and more requests from members of the public from all different wards, asking how I could help them with a whole range of health matters. We realised there were a lot of challenges in health in Peterborough. Something had to be done! It’s been created by Peterborough City Council with support from local and national health service organisations and Public Health England, so I’d like to thank them for helping us. Also our excellent public health team, which is very hard-working. I’ve got a super team of officers at the council and they are really enthusiastic about it.

What are the challenges?
One in four children aged four to five years are overweight, and so are seven in ten adults. We have a higher than average rate of people dying from heart disease and stroke before the age of 75. These were some of the issues that stimulated the campaign. We’ve actually had some very worrying statistics for several years in public health, but what the general public really wants is not statistics, but something tangible. So, we are tackling these health issues by launching the year-long Healthy Peterborough campaign, to try to encourage – and actively help – people to stay healthier for longer. That’s really how it started. I’m really quite excited about it!

How is it setting out to achieve that?
The campaign aims to raise awareness of health issues with local people, to promote simple health messages and provide tips for better health, as well as information about local opportunities for healthy living. We’re going to have all sorts of things to facilitate this campaign – posters and flags all around the city, a dedicated website, magazine and newspaper articles, Facebook posts, tweets, radio jingles… We need to get the message out to everybody in Peterborough and the rural areas. We’ve also started to do walks around the wards with the Director of Public Health, Dr Robin, and it’s great, because we get to talk to the different GPs and councillors and hear peoples’ problems first-hand, rather than just sitting in an office.

Dr Liz Robin
Director of Public Health

What is Peterborough City Council’s involvement with Public Health?
The Peterborough Healthy City campaign really comes out of the new responsibilities that the City Council took on in 2013 under the Health and Social Care Act. Now the Council has the duty of improving health in the local area. That’s still quite a new duty for the Council, but a really important one.

Why do people need something new?
I came in as Director of Public Health about a year ago, and I’ve had quite a lot of feedback from people that there is just so much information about health out there – different messages coming at them from different newspapers or websites – that they are really quite confused. What we’re trying to do is produce information that people can trust. So, we’re not trying to sell stories or products, we’re just trying to give people good advice about how to stay healthy. That means that everything we say in the campaign will have been checked by public health specialists, so will be reliable. And on the website you won’t just find advice that local public health specialists have written, but also links through to other sites with information that we know is reliable. So people will know they can trust that information. The other important thing is that we will be able to link people up with local services and opportunities to stay healthy, so it’s not just general advice. It’s about helping people to understand what they can do themselves to improve their health.

Can you give examples of what they can do?
Research from East Anglia shows that people who follow just four healthy behaviours – eating a healthy diet, being physical active, not smoking and drinking within safe limits – lived 14 years longer than those who didn’t, and stayed healthy for longer. If you walk briskly for half an hour a day, five days a week, that will make a big difference to your health. Giving up smoking also makes a huge difference, and we have services that can help people do that. There are also some conditions that people may not be aware of, such as a history of high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, but you can get these and other things checked via an NHS health check, which is available to everyone aged 40-74, every five years. It’s sort of a midlife MOT. That will also tell you what your lifestyle risks are, so as part of Heart Health month we’re recommending that people go for their health check.

Heart health and strokes

Advice from Dr Amrit Takhar, a local GP on the Clinical Commissioning Group in Cambridgeshire, who is working with Public Health to tackle cardio-vascular disease.

Prevention is better than cure
People in general are living longer, but we’d like to see people live longer in good health, and have quality of life. When I speak with my own patients, that’s what they want – quality of life. Some of the steps you can take are very simple – being more physically active, giving up smoking, going for health checks. That’s a way to potentially prevent illhealth – what we call primary prevention. But even if you already have certain conditions those steps can prevent worsening of the condition – secondary prevention.

Get moving!
2,000 extra steps a day – just walking a bit further than you normally do – can reduce your risk of heart disease by about 8%. So, it’s not that you have to go down to the gym and work out, it can just be a walk down to the shops. Walking costs nothing – and if you walk or cycle instead of catching the bus you could actually be saving yourself money! The human body was designed to move around, and if you don’t do that, you don’t keep the circulation going – and there is so much evidence now that inactivity is a major cause of disease. Working that regular exercise into your daily routine is the hardest part, but my experience is that when people get going they really feel the benefit – mentally as well as physically, because it’s also releasing endorphins that make you feel calmer and happier. One of my key areas of interest is cardiology, but the same problems that cause cardio-vascular disease actually cause a lot of other diseases, too. Inactivity, smoking, levels of stress, poor diet – not only do they cause cardio-vascular disease, they can cause such things as cancer, dementia and contribute to poor mental health.

Preventable strokes
Healthy Peterborough can also make people aware of conditions they may not be aware of, and which are easily treated. For example, there is a condition called atrial fibrillation, which is a type of irregular heartbeat, and you need to be aware – especially if you are over 50 – that if you have an irregular heartbeat, you should get it checked out because it could be a sign of this condition. Atrial fibrillation is a major cause of preventable stroke, because the irregular heartbeat can mean a clot develops in your heart which then can shoot off to one of the arteries in your brain, leading to quite a significant stroke. Not a lot of people are aware of the condition, but if you have it then you may need medication to thin your blood – and that will prevent you having that stroke. That simple health check could even save your life.

To find out more, go to www.healthypeterborough.org.uk

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