Liz Parsons is Programme Director – Community Programmes at Amplius. She’s in charge of expanding our health and housing partnership with bpha, Peabody and Public Health. The new, wider partnership is working with BeActive to encourage and enable residents to live healthier and more active lives. Here, she looks ahead at what she hopes to achieve…
Being appointed to oversee the expanded partnership between public health, housing and BeActive is a real privilege for me.
Working closely with Peabody, bpha, Public Health, BeActive and Sport England, we can support residents to lead more active lives. Alongside this, we will also be working more widely to look at strategy and policy and how we develop healthy places approaches.
This initiative – an extension of our ongoing Health and Housing Partnership, which has engaged over 3,000 residents and connected more than 600 of them with public health or support services – brings fresh resources and programmes to increase physical activity and improve health equity in local communities.
It forms part of Sport England’s Place Universal Offer, which seeks to provide the right blend of support, resources and investment to every local community across England, so that everyone has the chance to be active.
The opportunity to lead this project so that our customers – as well as those from Peabody and bpha – have opportunities to live healthier and more active lives is one which I’m extremely passionate about.
Residents will benefit from the wider focus of the partnership, the joining up of health and wellbeing offers with physical activity and the chance to be more active. We know that physical inactivity is linked to one in six deaths in the UK and costs £7.4bn annually, so we must, can, and will do more.
Housing associations have a great track record of supporting residents to be more active, and across the partnership, we’ve been working with BeActive for some time to be able to offer more opportunities to people living in Bedfordshire.
We’ll focus our efforts on areas where we know there is the greatest need, and we’re determined to help make active, healthy living a reality where our residents live. This project will help to embed activity and health and wellbeing opportunities into the fabric of our housing communities.
Here at Amplius, our GrandActive project uses sport and fitness activities to promote health and wellbeing among those aged between eight and 25. Sport England research shows that in children and young people, there is a strong connection between physical activity and happiness. It also highlights that children facing the greatest health inequalities are the least likely to be active, so such a project is vital in helping foster these improvements.
We’re going to use the knowledge gained from these programmes to develop a series of test and learn projects that will help broaden and further the range of physical activity and health opportunities that are available for residents.
We’ll continue to work with partners like the Chartered Institute of Housing to develop the blueprint work for the sector. We will also be working more closely with Sport England and the Town and Country Planning Association to support the work around strategic change.
There are lots of other things going on as part of the partnership, which will have great benefits for our customers.
Our work around supporting stop smoking initiatives will continue this year, resources to support how we work with residents living with hoarding disorder are being developed, and we’re linking in with initiatives like Connect to Work to support co-location of advisors with housing partners.
This is an area with countless opportunities, and I’m determined to make sure that this exciting and innovative partnership helps us achieve the outcomes we all want to see for our customers.