This week’s leadership message comes from Nigel Harrison, and our blog is from and Jo Baker and Sonya Ainley

We are again in the midst of a fantastic summer of sport. The Olympics and Paralympics showcase inspiring stories of super-human achievement and, like me, you may be glued to watching and learning about sports you may have never experienced before.

As proud CEO of Yorkshire Sport Foundation, you may expect me to say that the Games will be a catalyst for getting people playing sport and being active for years to come. In truth, it doesn’t happen like that. There will, indeed, be some young people who aspire to be like their idols, and we need to ensure we do as much as we can to help fulfil their dreams. But, on the whole, whilst the Games lift our mood, give us drama and entertainment and make us proud of our national athletes, we’ve learned that events like this generally don’t lift population activity levels. Life is much more complex than that.

That said, the Games do give us a chance to talk about sport, physical activity and movement and why they are important to all of us across West Yorkshire.

Yorkshire Sport Foundation is one of 42 Active Partnerships, primarily funded by Sport England to ensure that sport, physical activity and movement play their full part in addressing health and wider social inequalities across our communities. Our role is to bring organisations and people together; provide support in delivering opportunities; and influence policies, strategies and decision makers to make physical activity everybody’s business.  

Just to explain the ‘sport’ bit. Our focus is on people being active, which covers the plethora of ways in which people move. We know that everyone has their own view and relationship with being active and defines it in their own way. To some people it’s ‘sport’, to others it’s ‘physical activity’ or ‘exercise’ and to many more it’s simply ‘movement’. In our day-to-day work, we’re acutely aware of the importance of the language we use, depending upon who we speak to. For the purpose of the rest of this blog, please excuse me for just using the term ‘physical activity’, if only to save on the word count. 

So why physical activity? Hopefully you will recognise that being active is good for mental and physical health, but the mounting evidence of the extent to which it is, is often startling:

• up to 30% reduction in all-cause mortality
• up to 35% reduction in cardiovascular disease
• up to 40% reduction in type 2 diabetes
• up to 30% reduction in colon cancer
• up to 20% reduction in breast cancer
• up to 68% reduction in hip fractures
• up to 30% reduction in depression

And of course the contribution to generally living well on a day-to-day basis. Little wonder the Chief Medical Officer has described physical activity as a ‘miracle cure’. 

The good news is that most adults are active, meaning we get a bit out of breath or sweaty for 150 minutes in a week. However, around 25% to 30% of our population are active for less than thirty minutes a week, which can have serious health implications. We also know that inactivity levels are related to a range of socio-economic factors. In short, if you are on a low income, from certain ethnic backgrounds, are older and/or have a disability or long-term condition, you are much less likely to be active. We also still see a significant gender imbalance. These inequalities drive our work and are central to our strategy and ways of working to achieve equity and fairness. 

Our activity levels are a product of where and how we live and our experiences when young. I have often heard Professor John Wright at Born in Bradford say, “If we’d have set out 40 years ago to make our population less active, we probably would have done what we have done” as he points to increasing car use, digital innovations, labour saving devices and increasing safety concerns. 

So, there is a job to be done so everyone can find it easy and enjoyable to be active in the ways in which they want to and to build physical activity back into every day lives as the natural thing to do across our county. 

Each of our five districts has ‘Place Based Partnerships’, which bring together a wide range of people and organisations adopting a systems approach to physical activity. Collaborative work is taking place to influence policies, strategies and the way in which we do things, focusing on those areas of our lives that affect our activity: our parks and green space; our community facilities and organisations; our walking, cycling and wheeling infrastructure; our built environments; PE, sport and activity in schools and colleges; our brilliant sports clubs; our places in which we work; and the way in which we communicate. Each Partnership will receive core funding from Sport England for the next five years which will help, but this will only go so far and we need everyone involved to have a truly significant and sustainable impact. This work and these structures play their part in our collective West Yorkshire health and care system.

There is also increasing recognition that physical activity plays an important role in physical and mental clinical pathways. For example, the work in our public leisure facilities, who increasingly see themselves as community health hubs, where a range of referral pathway services are in place in areas such as cardiac rehabilitation, falls prevention, pre-habilitation and post-habilitation cancer, weight management and pre- and post-natal. In truth, whilst there is a huge amount of great work taking place, there is much more that can be done to make it an integral part of service delivery rather than short term and resource limited programmes; provision still remains patchy across our area and we are working on making this more easily accessible and available to those people that need it most. 

We also know that health professionals have a significant role in signposting and supporting people into physical activity due to the respected role they play. Please do get in touch if you need more from us in doing so. 

West Yorkshire has been identified by UK Active as an area to develop a blueprint for an ICS Exemplar model for delivering comprehensive, integrated health and physical activity programmes on a sustainable basis. This is not surprising considering the collaborative environment that has developed over the last few years. The lines between those working within our health systems and our physical activity systems are increasingly blurred as colleagues work together to address health inequalities.

A few months ago, over 100 people came together to move this work forward. A framework for further work has been agreed with a growing commitment to find workable solutions. A similar event is planned for Tuesday 8 October 2024. Please do get involved if you can.

So please do enjoy the wonders of the Games, embrace its principles of faster, higher, stronger – together, be inspired and support others who are inspired; sport is great. Also please do let it remind us that embedding activity into our day-to-day lives can have a huge impact in addressing our health inequalities. 

Thank you for reading.

Nigel