Moving Healthcare Professionals is a national programme, led by Public Health England (PHE) and Sport England, to support healthcare professionals to increase their knowledge and skills, and incorporate physical activity within routine care to support quality improvement and better patient outcomes.
The critical role of healthcare professionals to increase activity among people has been highlighted in the national physical activity framework, Everybody Active Every Day, and also supports the government’s Sporting Future strategy, which set an ambition to integrate sport and physical activity into care pathways.
It was initiated in 2017 and has been designed to:
Provide evidence-based training and support resources for healthcare professionals to improve awareness, knowledge, confidence and skills to promote physical activity to patients to prevent and manage ill health.
Test how to best embed physical activity within clinical practice so that physical activity conversations, signposting and prescribing become part of normal NHS clinical practice.
Support the management of patients with long-term conditions, including people with diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Help reduce long-term demand and costs on the NHS.
The programme includes peer-led training courses led by our physical activity clinical champions, e-learning modules, resources to use during consultations such as the award winning Moving Medicine platform (winner of the Royal College of Physicians Excellence in patient care award for person-centred care 2020) and pilots in NHS Trusts to identify how physical activity can be embedded within the care pathway.
See below: Moving Medicine - evidence-based resource to support physical activity conversations in clinical conditions.
Catherine Lester, Sport and Exercise Medicine Consultant , Moving Medicine
To date, more than 28,000 healthcare professionals have been trained to include physical activity conversation in their practice with patients by our network of physical activity clinical champions across England. Over 180,000 e-learning modules have been completed and over 53,000 people have used the Moving Medicine resource.
The programme has been recognised by the World Health Organisation global action plan on physical activity (2018 -2030) as good practice, and an expansion of the programme until 2022 was launched in the government’s 2019 Prevention Green Paper.