Essex County Council and their partners, including HCRG and Active Essex, aim to focus on the overall system within the county and aspire to build evidence-based, targeted, and collective approaches that promote healthy weight, rather than developing programmes in isolation.
Essex County Council are undertaking a full research programme to understand the determinants of excess weight in children and young people (CYP) in the county. This programme will review the evidence, policy, and strategy to build a comprehensive understanding of the causes of excess weight in Essex.
The challenge
This evidence-led approach to understanding the determinants of excess weight was initiated to increase the impact of interventions across the range of determinants that influence weight gain. There are many reasons children don’t necessarily enjoy, or partake in, healthy lifestyle behaviours and therefore outcomes focusing on programmes in isolation were not yielding the results desired.
Essex County Council and their partners recognise that this approach faces challenges of its own. Not least of these is funding research to get a detailed understanding of the real drivers of excess weight in Essex and the relative contributions of these drivers. This is partly due to how transdisciplinary and complex the issue is. However, the difficulties of undertaking this research outweigh the risks of failure that may present without a coordinated and targeted approach organised around the determinants of excess weight.
The solution
System influence
- Hardwiring healthy lifestyle behaviours, such as physical activity and movement, and healthy eating, into the priorities of the system.
- Building shared purpose, genuine collaboration and trusted relationships.
- Making sure the burden of encouraging children to adopt healthy lifestyle behaviours does not fall on single organisations or sectors alone.
The approach taken by partners across Essex, including HCRG and Active Essex, is community led to encourage a genuinely whole system approach that reflects individual needs and circumstances around young people.
This means that where the Council is not the first organisation children and families turn to, there are still organisations and services they can access which understand their needs and can respond to barriers in pursuing a healthy weight.
The model borrows from the safeguarding principle that it is everybody’s business, making it the role of services across the board to promote consistent messages that raise health literacy around healthy weight.
Partnerships and collective responsibility
Active Essex do not have their own strategy but have led on the development of a physical activity strategy for Essex County Council. It is owned by the Essex ecosystem and has synergy with other strategic documents driving Essex forwards e.g. Everyone's Essex, Wellbeing, Public Health & Communities Business Plan, Children and Young People's Plan, Levelling Up Essex.
Similarly, the emerging Essex healthy weight strategy is being developed by the Essex system, with ECC Public Health as a partner and facilitator to ensure the strategy is collectively owned across Essex.
Understanding our communities
Essex County Council and their partners believe that understanding their communities, their lived experience and meeting people where they are at is vital. Partners across Essex, in particular Active Essex, approach this by building relationships and helping to improve capacity, resource and skills in other groups and organisations that people trust.
Targeted
Essex ensure that their efforts and resources are proportionate to need whilst also having a universal offer for all.
The impact
Adopting an evidence led approach allows Essex County Council and their partners to position healthy weight services most effectively to meet the diverse needs of children and young people. With more evidence, new approaches can be developed to raise positive attitudes towards healthy eating and physical activity and address the broader determinants of excess weight among children and their families. Gathering evidence about determinants and programme approaches in the areas of greatest deprivation can be used to target limited resources for the greatest impact.
Holiday Activity and Food programme (HAF)
Over 160 local organisations deliver the Holiday Activity and Food (HAF) programme, the majority of which are physical activity delivery organisations.
As a result of HAF, Essex County Council now has a sport and physical activity sector able to recognise and support the wider needs of children and families that they previously might have solely delivered sport or physical activity to.
HAF delivery partners have received training on food hygiene and asset-based community development, are now better connected to the early help system and are able to signpost families to other services. The HAF and food education programme has helped children and their families make healthier choices within a budget. This work has led to a partnership with Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food programme to upskill sport and community partners to deliver the programme back into the community.
Move With Us
Active Essex launched a behaviour change campaign called Move With Us, co-designed with young people, following an Essex Strategic Children’s Board item about the importance of a system response to getting children and young people in Essex moving more. It aims to raise positive attitudes and experiences of being active and support young people and families into activities that are right for them.
How is the new approach being sustained?
The approach is sustained by actively pursuing partnership working, enabling a community-centred comprehensive and coordinated set of programmes.
For example, engaging local organisations has led to the delivery of local pilots that embed a place-based approach and gather localised data for physical activity promotion.
Lessons learned
Essex County Council and partners are actively incorporating the lessons learned from ongoing delivery of healthy weight programmes to children and young people alongside the research to help refine approaches.
Their approach has been inspired by the previous programme delivery for children and young people’s healthy weight in the county. Essex County Council has learned that the full spectrum of excess weight determinants must be understood and that a programme framework should be built to encourage healthy weight across different parts of the system which can be tailored to local circumstances and individual needs.
The Public Health, Wellbeing and Communities team know that not every approach will work, and it is vitally important to learn and adapt to co-create services with communities that leverage different parts of the system.
Their research programme is systematising the understanding of the need to focus effort on the real drivers of the problem to maximise impact for children and their families across Essex.
Contact
Adrian Coggins, Head of Wellbeing and Public Health