Forging new relationships to fight obesity in Fife

In Fife, there are high levels of overweight and obesity among children, young people and adults. Maintaining a healthy diet and weight significantly reduces the risk of developing many long term health conditions, including Type 2 Diabetes. However, being overweight is influenced by many environmental, economic and social factors, often completely outside of an individual’s control. As such, a wide range of stakeholders from across the whole system have come together in Fife to identify and tackle the causes of obesity among children and young people. Here we find out about the progress of their community pilot and what they hope to get out of efforts to test a Whole Systems Approach.

 

1. A Whole Systems Approach (WSA) to diet and healthy weight is being adopted by local areas across Scotland and will be used to pilot community interventions. What does this mean in practice and from your experience to date in Fife, how do you feel it can help us to support local communities to lead a healthy lifestyle and reduce their risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes?

Taking a WSA to diet and healthy weight provides an opportunity to bring partners together across communities and sectors to understand more about the causes of obesity locally. It involves exploring the local context, people’s understanding of the issue and current barriers that exist. This will help us to develop a shared understanding of the problem and enable partners to recognise their role in identifying the best actions to tackle this.

 

2. What has been achieved so far in Fife to adopt a Whole Systems Approach and enter the discovery phase of your project? Why have you chosen Dumfermline and Cowdenbeath as an area to invest in?

We have a strong working group with cross sector representation from the NHS, Council, Health and Social Care Partnership, community and third sector. The engagement from Dunfermline and Cowdenbeath Community Managers and desire to advance change in these areas was a key reason we decided to work with them on this project.

 

 3. You held your first pilot workshop on 18 March where stakeholders came together to discuss and identify local causes of overweight and obesity. How did participants find the session and what were the key outcomes?

The first step of the project is to understand more about local causes of obesity and the factors that influence these. Delivering the first workshop virtually through Microsoft Teams was challenging – but also gave us the opportunity to easily engage with a large number of people and capture their input using Miro. As everything was online, we developed a number of short video clips – to visually explain what a WSA is, provide relevant local statistics and outline the local context, along with what we set out to achieve in the workshop. We shared some information with participants beforehand to ensure they were prepared and allow us to get the most out of the time together.

Click on the following links to watch these videos and find out more about:

  • Video 1: Our approach and what we hope to achieve in Fife
  • Video 2: Local statistics and context
  • Video 3: Dona Milne, Director of Public Health at NHS Fife explains why this work is important
  • Video 4: What we set out to achieve in workshop 1

The feedback from participants who attended has been positive. Using the short clips and pre-workshop information appears to have been an effective way to share information about the project. It was really positive to find that stakeholders understood their role in this work and why their input was needed. At the end of the workshop, we asked attendees to contribute to a word cloud – which identified that knowledge, new ideas and the need for collaboration were the key takeaways.

 

4. How has Covid-19 impacted the adoption, design and roll out of a whole systems pilot in Fife? What are the challenges and opportunities?

The circumstances of the last year have provided a number of challenges to the roll out of this project. Responding to the pandemic has meant that many of our stakeholders and working group members have been redeployed and unable to prioritise this work in the way that we had planned to.

The practicalities of delivering the stakeholder workshop virtually through Microsoft Teams required a lot of extra thought and planning. We considered what the key outcomes were for the session and how we could best use online platforms to achieve these. We decided to spend most of the time on group discussions with our stakeholders, limiting the amount of formal presentations to gain as much engagement as possible.

Many local planning groups and services are currently reviewing action plans and priorities as we begin to emerge from the pandemic. This presents opportunities for actions related to this important piece of work to be embedded in local delivery plans. And in light of the impact of Covid-19 on diet and healthy weight across the country, there is still a lot of commitment to taking this forward.

 

5. What are your plans for the coming months and how will you continue to engage a range of community stakeholders in the process?

Over the coming months, our WSA working group will reflect on our progress to date and carefully plan how to engage with more of our key stakeholders and local communities. We are excited to see this work develop.