Footpaths to Fitness
Helping people to live happier, healthier lives
Healthy Lives
Helping Cheshire East Council deliver a public health transformation initiative. Working together to make a positive difference to people’s lives, supporting personal responsibility and good lifestyle choices, to live happier, healthier, and independently for longer.
Challenge
A Sport England’s Active People Survey, highlighted that a proportion of the population of Crewe featured in the bottom 10.7% to 17.5% quartile of participation in sport and active recreation.
17.8% of the resident population suffered from a life-limiting disability and the area demonstrated the worst statistics in the borough across a range of public health priorities including differences in life expectancies, excess weight gain in 10-11 year olds and percentage screened with diabetes. Primary Care Trusts were spending an average of £6.2m per year dealing with the consequences of physical inactivity, with an inactive person spending 37% more days in hospital and 5.5% more visits to the doctor than an active person.
Collaborate
Evidence indicates that exercise improves health and reduces the risk of a wide range of conditions by 20-50% and the Chief Medical Officer for England stated “for most people, the easiest and most acceptable forms of physical activity are those that can be incorporated into everyday life such as walking”.
Research also concluded that both ‘soft’ measures that promote walking, and ‘hard’ measures that provide high-quality infrastructure, are necessary to reduce the barriers that prevent people from walking.
This project would deliver both of these measures and our task was to increase awareness of walking for well-being. Upscaling usage of promoted local countryside routes and paths by targeted residents, to increase levels of physical activity in those areas.
Create
The key message was ‘The Countryside is on Your Doorstep’ and supporting messages included walking is good for your health, keeps your heart strong, helps you to feel good, helps you manage and control weight, helps reduce stress, and promotes better sleep.
In line with audience personas, we created a distinctive brand, ‘Footpaths to Fitness’ which was supported by a fun, friendly, and recognisable family-focused theme ‘Meet the Walkers’.
The integrated campaign constituted a mix of direct mail via door drop, posters and pop-up banners for the healthcare community, bus and local advertising, plus self-guided walks leaflets, maps, and environmental waymarkers to highlight the routes.
Change
The campaign was part of a programme of measured and focused initiatives that continue today, in order to increase and sustain participation in outdoor, healthy lifestyle activities targeted at Cheshire East residents.
The campaign extended from Crewe, to Nantwich, Congleton, and Tatton. Addressing the inactivity issue of lifestyle influences on health and wellbeing, and focused interventions in the highest-risk areas.
Research supports the use of walking activity and high quality green space access programmes, as a cost effective method of delivering public health improvement intervention, with a cost-benefit ratio of 1 to 7. In fact, if 1 in 10 of the 7 million inactive people in the UK took a brisk 10 minute walk every day, it would prevent 251 potential deaths per year and achieve an economic saving of £310 million.
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95
%
Encouraged to walk the promoted route
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90
%
Likely to explore other local walks
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68
%
Will exercise more for health reasons
