The recently published NHS Four Ways Forward to harness the benefits of physical activity includes empowering health and care professionals with the skills and confidence to discuss and promote physical activity with their patients, and to integrate it into key clinical pathways.
This includes incorporating physical activity into the undergraduate healthcare curricula and continuing professional development offers for health and care professionals.
The Moving Healthcare Professional Programme set out to understand routes to doing just this.
And to better understand how we ensure the next generation of healthcare professionals has the knowledge, skills and confidence to support their patients to be active, The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) in collaboration with Sport England hosted two workshops in 2023 with different stakeholders, from government, academia and health organisations among others.
Building movement into the classrooms
The first focused on identifying the content that should be taught, how it should be delivered and how knowledge and skills should be assessed, while the second focused on the required stakeholder actions to progress the integration of physical activity into undergraduate healthcare education.
The conversations during these sessions resulted in consensus on what needs to happen with four stakeholder groups that were identified as having an important role in shaping the future of healthcare in education – professional bodies, universities, course leaders and students.
Today these have been published in full on the Sport England website to share the learning, drive future conversations and deliver change.
Some of the headline points of consensus from the conversations included:
- learning outcomes need to include the importance of physical inactivity as a modifiable risk factor for noncommunicable diseases, along with the physical activity recommendations for specific subgroups like children, pregnant women and older adults
- emphasis is needed on communication skills to talk about physical activity with patients
- physical activity content should be included in all years of study. Theory-based learning should be the focus in early years of training, progressing to more practice-based learning in later years to support translation to practice
- medical and health schools should also provide physical activity placement opportunities and promote participation among students so they can experience its benefits first-hand and become role models for patients
- students’ knowledge should be assessed, as well as their competence in communicating physical activity information to patients, and these evaluations need to be done using a variety of assessment formats, like structured clinical examinations, case studies and role play
- the different professional bodies should provide clear and concise guidance on learning outcomes for the different health professional groups and issue educational standards that clearly describe the minimum expectation for physical activity teaching within health-related courses
- universities and medical schools should identify institutional leaders to drive this agenda and provide faculty staff with dedicated time to facilitate the incorporation of physical activity into curricula
- course leaders should take responsibility for integrating physical activity into the curricula and develop and implement a spiral curriculum, and students should input into the education programmes' design and content.
Whilst the required actions largely lie with those involved in education, stakeholders felt that greater and faster traction may be gained through strong government leadership for this agenda.
For example, through raising the profile of physical activity within the higher education sector or by seeking to influence professional bodies to modify their current professional standards.
It would be great to see stakeholders coming together to help advance action to ensure that the healthcare workforce is equipped to promote and support all patients to be physically active, just like Hippocrates recommended so many centuries ago.
