What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme?

Creating health is more than treating disease. It’s working in partnership with citizens to generate solutions that provide more opportunities for care driven by what matters to people using services.

The NHS constitutions’ pledge ‘to provide the most effective, fair and sustainable use of public resources’ has been undermined by chronic backlogs created by COVID-19. COVID-19 has highlighted inequalities in NHS provision and demonstrated the urgent need to work differently to support our most underserved communities. This is well known by front line staff and we are beginning to see Government align with this need too.

The PCI/RCGP accredited Prescribing Lifestyle Medicine (PLM) shifts the focus from disease management to creating health, training/supporting practitioners to have personalised conversations with people about preventing, treating and reversing chronic disease/symptoms through lifestyle change. Recognising the biopsychosocial reasons why this is challenging, PLM works with people to build activation and co-create lifestyle prescriptions.

What does your project aim to achieve?

We want to change the way that the system delivers primary care.

This project builds on extensive research that healthy lifestyle is important, by giving practitioners a practical way to implement and delivering a robust evaluation which shows focussing on a personalised approach saves the system time/money by reduced failure demand.

We will:

·        Give practitioners a safe/effective toolkit for co-creating practical lifestyle changes with individuals

·        Tackle health inequalities by providing a deeply personalised framework that considers the wider determinants of health. PLM isn’t telling people to eat less and move more; it takes a holistic approach

·        Build practitioners capability and confidence in personalised care

·        Bring together Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in data, personalisation and product to refine our hypothesis and build data capture models

Produce an externally validated evaluation which shows the benefits and blind spots of the PLM approach that can be easily and quickly shared to scale learning

How will the project be delivered?

A collaboration between KSS AHSN, Here, Clinical Education, Unity Insights and a PCN pilot site will work cross organisationally to bring together analysts, health economists, Practice/PCN Managers, Health Coaches, GPs, personalised care SMEs and product owners for a logic model workshop to build an evaluation framework.

This framework sets out the plan for a mixed methods evaluation to be conducted with the following activities.

·        Qualitative and quantitative data capture and analysis to understand the impact of PLM on the health and social system, including understanding patients’ outcomes and experience.

·        Seek other’s views through Hexitime platform.

·        A health economic return on investment (ROI) model will be created to assess the costs and benefits (CBA) and understand the potential short- and medium- term value of PLM.

A final independent evaluation report will validate and analyse all available data to enable discussion regarding the benefits and costs, impact, and limitations of the programme.

How is your project going to share learning?

Sharing learning is at the heart of this collaboration’s purpose. We will present our findings in various formats (abstract report, infographics, blogs) so learning is easily disseminated through:

·        Q exchange

·        Here’s network of 3000 Practices, 15,000 practitioners across England, Scotland, Wales

·        PLM community of practice of 200 practitioners

·        Social media/email campaigns

·        Conversations with system leaders/commissioners.

A technical report will also be available showing greater detail on methodology for system learners.

This evaluation will not only demonstrate the potential value of PLM to the system but will support community learning through connecting people interested in this area. It will feedback learnings from patients and staff which will provide a greater understanding as to how PLM can best fit different populations groups and geographies by engaging and gathering data from multiple sites. This will offer insight into how and where best the programme could be spread and adopted further in the NHS.