March 18, 2016

Service Manager Claire Tells Us About Be Well…

Since November 2011 PSS have delivered the Barnsley Health Trainer Service for anybody 16+ who wanted to make a healthy lifestyle change. Health Trainers focused on using behaviour change techniques to set small goals working towards their bigger lifestyle goal e.g. losing weight, stopping smoking, becoming more active.In November 2015 a new integrated wellbeing service ‘Be Well Barnsley’ was tendered for and won by PSS. This brought together Stop Smoking Service, Weight Management Service and Health Trainers under one umbrella a one stop shop for support. PSS are the lead provider and South West Yorkshire Foundation Trust (SWYFT) are our delivery partner for stop smoking. Commissioners wanted a range of interventions delivered with innovation for the new service. The changes mean we now have new targets and areas of responsibility locally in Barnsley including; children and family healthy eating and healthy weight support; adult weight management; and stopping smoking in pregnancy. As part of the re-brand of the service, we re-named Health Trainers ‘Be Well Advisors’, although their role remains the same just with some new areas they are now delivering including 12 rolling programme of weight loss groups called ‘Choose 2 Lose’. We also carried out important insight which helped guide our new service with valuable feedback. Findings were that people wanted us to: provide information people can trust and rely on, give people time given to talk through the challenges they face, how they don’t just want to be healthier but also enjoy life more, support tailored for them and marketing materials using real people, from this we came up with the Be Well Barnsley strapline: ‘Choose What Works For You.’ We now have a central hub which is a shop front location in Barnsley Town Centre where we sit alongside SWYFT staff and have a new 0800 number, helping us with our seamless referral pathway and making it as easy as possible for local people to access support. Although we are now not commissioned to deliver physical activity groups as before, we have been able to sustain these through the support of our Health Champions up skilling them to deliver and run these groups within their communities. We now focus on supporting local people to achieve a 3 – 5 % weight loss and
engaging women in pregnancy. This means we are still able to deliver our award winning tailored programmes such as Fit Reds, Fit Me and Fit Mums.Although we know this will be a challenge, things are heading in the right direction and In January 2016 we had a 72% increase in referrals compared to December. For more information check our Facebook (BeWellBarnsley) or our website and currently developing our new website www.bewell-barnsley.com We’re planning to develop this to be an interactive digital portal to access self-help tools.