Become an active practice – boosting physical activity

Sign up on the RCGP website to the Active Practice Charter.

Sign up on the RCGP website to the Active Practice Charter. 

Demonstrate having taken steps to:

• Reduce sedentary behaviour in staff;
• Reduce sedentary behaviour in patients;
• Increase physical activity in staff; 
• Increase physical activity in patients; 
• Partner with a local physical activity provider 

There are 5+ options suggested for each aim on the RCGP Active Practice website, some of which may already be happening in your practice.  

There are resources to help you carry out each aim, including waiting room posters and flyers, social media resources, and recorded masterclasses. 

If choosing to become a parkrun practice as part of partnering with a local physical activity provider:

Make contact with local parkrun team and then register practice.  

Patient-facing resources:

Share resources from Moving Medicine’s Patient Info Finder, tailored for patients of different ages and with different conditions, including goal setting and activity diaries  

Share resources like short ‘five in five’ physical activities with patients. https://weareundefeatable.co.uk/ways-to-move/resources/five-in-five/ 

Staff-facing resources:

Promote Moving Medicine resources at a practice meeting. The consultation guides are tailored for patients of different ages and with different conditions (from heart disease to cancer, depression, postnatal, hospital associated deconditioning, and more). These support short conversations (developed for time-stretched professionals, with 1, 5, and 5+ minute options) with patients on how activity can improve their health.   

Share e-learning by  https://www.e-lfh.org.uk/programmes/physical-activity-and-health/ on the benefits of physical activity. Familiarise teams with the infographics available from public health England  https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/physical-activity-guidelines-infographics .  

Patient-facing messages:

You might want to consider sending patients an SMS message, through AccuRx, about parkrun. This can be a follow-up to a personal recommendation (with the relevant SNOMED code inbuilt), or a more generic message to all patients.  Example SMS messages are below, but feel free to come up with your own wording.  

IT search

Using searches and codes described on RCGP active practice website may be helpful to enable targeting of patients who may most benefit from physical activity discussion/referral, and audit of this.    

Study

Evaluate progress on how you are implementing the active practice charter, share with the practice team and decide if any changes are needed to improve further.