Improving the Communication of the Chief Medical Officer's Physical Activity Guidelines

The UK Chief Medical Officers (CMO) are due to publish new guidelines on physical activity in 2019. They will recommend how much physical activity we should do and what types of physical activity most benefit our health. The new guidelines will be based on a comprehensive review of the latest research.

In the past, physical activity guidelines have been tricky to understand and difficult to follow. Through this project, the CLAHRC West team, alongside collaborators Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC), will make the physical activity guidelines more meaningful and useful for members of the public.

We are planning three pieces of work as part of this project. In the first, we will work with three or four community groups in the Knowle West area of Bristol. We will run several workshops for these groups to understand what physical activity means to them, and importantly, to understand how best to communicate physical activity messages to their community.

Some people in these groups will also see themselves as being physically active, despite the modern world being designed in a way that encourages inactivity. Our second piece of work will use an approach called ‘creative non-fiction’ (CNF) to create several emotive, first person case studies that illustrate how people have managed to be active. The CNF case studies will be co-produced with people who attended the workshops. KWMC will then work with the public contributors to create short films based upon each CNF case study.

The final piece of work will be to create a toolkit for communications and healthcare professionals that provides advice and guidance on how to tailor physical activity messages to various community groups. The team will work with the end users to ensure that the toolkit is as useful as possible. This toolkit will include information about the language people prefer and the best ways to share physical activity messages, for example via videos, pictures, or media campaigns.

Underpinning this project is KWMCs six-phased framework to community engagement – the “Bristol Approach”. The framework makes sure that the public are involved in the design, testing and evaluation of socially-beneficial products, such as the physical activity guidelines. The Bristol Approach has been used on issues surrounding food waste and damp in homes. Our work will help to strengthen the usefulness of the Bristol Approach by adopting it in a new field of research.

We have gained funding from the University of Bristol’s Brigstow Institute to help realise this project.