Agenda item - Leisure and Culture Strategy

Agenda item

Leisure and Culture Strategy

To receive a report on the Leisure and Culture Strategy and the vision for physical activity for health in Enfield. 

Minutes:

The Board received a report from the Director of Finances, Resources and Customer Services on the Leisure and Culture Strategy.

 

Jess Khanom, Acting Head of Leisure, Facilities and Sport, presented the report to the Board highlighting the following: 

 

·       The Leisure and Culture Strategy, launched last July 2016, focusses on improving lives in the community though leisure and culture.

 

·       Leisure and sport has a big impact on health and wellbeing, social development and the local economy.  It can be fun and exciting and bring the community together.  As well as helping to develop skills for life and work. 

 

·       The strategy is based on three key principles: engage, inspire and grow: engaging with alternative groups, making use of alternative technology methods and social media; inspire by helping to raise aspirations, challenging the community, encouraging step challenges and helping to promote community cohesion; grow by helping people to develop and build resource capacity.

 

·       Some work is being focussed on the five priority wards by working with the community and through the training of local staff. 

 

·       Nationally the Government is due to launch Department for Culture Media and Sport strategy to encourage people to undertake more physical activity.

 

·       The service would like to use the findings from the National Commissioning Project and the Leisure Officers Association and Sport England, exploring the strategic positioning of sport and physical activities for wider social and health outcomes, to develop a joint outcomes framework with the Health and Wellbeing Board. 

 

·       We need to find out how best to implement measures to achieve the desired health outcomes and how to work with our partners to add value to our work. 

 

·       This will also be discussed with the Health Improvement Partnership Board.

 

Questions/Comments on the Presentation

 

1.               More work needed to be done when training new GPs, around the area of social prescribing, as well as encouraging exercise in the work place.

 

2.               Primary Care would be the right place to start with these type of initiatives, but there were no resources for them or any formal referral mechanism.

 

3.               Some funding had been made available to train up GPs in this area.

 

4.               One challenge was finding ways to best engage with a diverse population and to reach out to the hard to reach groups. 

 

5.               A recent project had been undertaken visiting mosques during Ramadan to highlight the issue of diabetes.  A similar initiative could be undertaken to promote the benefits of exercise. 

 

6.               The suggestion that consideration of where the greatest benefits would be, needs to take place in order to target limited resources effectively was made: segmenting different groups and developing targeted strategies to address specific needs.

 

7.               Sport could be off putting for older people and younger people often give up after leaving school.  Ways to encourage continued participation, needed to be developed.  A health scare was often a wake-up call.  School nurses had the opportunity to work with a whole family when they contacted parents about overweight children in Reception and Years 1 and 2. 

 

8.               The ambition must be that every resident will have opportunities for physical activity but resources must be provided for those with difficulties and those who are most vulnerable. 

 

9.               A universal programme should be put in place.

 

10.           There was concern about the lack of baseline data and the inability of judging therefore, the success of any initiatives.  However children were measured in reception classes and in Year 6.  

 

11.           A root cause analysis of the issues was required to find out the reasons for lack of participation in physical activity.  The whole family’s needs would have to be addressed.  This was not easy to do and would be a long term programme, but work was progressing in the 5 target wards. 

 

12.           The Local Authority would be working with partners to stimulate demand.  We needed to work out how to use local influence to encourage use of services and how to best use the resources available.   

 

AGREED

 

1.              To use the findings from the National Commissioning Project and work with the Chief Leisure Officers Association and Sport England to explore the strategic positioning of sport and physical activity for wider social and health outcomes.

2.              To jointly develop and outcomes framework with the Health and Wellbeing Board and Health Improvement Partnership to enable a focus on key priorities.

Supporting documents: