We understand that to truly make waves it’s important for us to reach new audiences. Audiences that don’t regularly hear the physical activity message, audiences who have other things on their agenda. We want to cut through that noise and make an impact!
So, when Dr Emma Gladwinfield approached Emily in January about submitting an abstract to the Royal College of General Practitioners Conference this seemed like the perfect place to see if our messages land and are well received in a different arena. And boy did we choose a big arena!
The ExCel Arena in London is the home of world-leading events and this year’s WONCA / RCGP annual conference, where delegates come together to hear from leading experts in the field of Health Inequalities, Quality Improvement, Service Development, and Innovation. Together an Active Future (TaAF) were excited to be able to take our messages to this new audience.
Here are some of the steps and preparations we took that ended with us sharing TaAF approaches with GPs from across Europe:
Knowing our audience
We at TaAF feel this is incredibly important for sharing our learning and raising awareness. Truly understanding the audience’s agenda and current challenges really goes a long way to being able to tailor the message and content so that it lands and has the desired impact. Luckily, we had a well-equipped team in this area…
- Emily Brady- Young – Research & Evaluation Lead. With Emily’s experiences in academic writing and presenting research that lands, we could prepare evidence-based abstracts for submission and filter through to the key messages for presenting.
- Dr Emma Gladwinfield – GP St James Practice Rossendale. As a GP Trainer at Lancaster University Medical School and seconded to TaAF Rossendale 1 day per week for schools’ health support, Emma reflects the audience we wanted to reach, she is on board with our approaches to systems change, and as a member of the GP community, reflects the audiences experiences, passion and challenges.
- Sarah Berne – Programme Manager Pennine Lifestyle Hub. With great knowledge of working within programmes that connect health care with the community and experience of working alongside GPs to understand the current challenges they face, Sarah is well positioned to reflect the perspectives of all who work around referral and social prescribing programmes.
Between us we produced three evidence-based abstracts for submission, knowing that the expectation for this level of the conference would be to share our findings from our original academic and practitioner research. This conference, however, was different and had a range of presentation modes to select from. Designed to share short, sharp concise information with time poor GPs, but with lots of networking opportunities and space for individual follow ups. We liked this! It meant we had to cut out the waffle and get to the point.
Planning & preparation
Being a part of the Sport England Local Delivery Pilot has given us the key enabler of having time and space to collaborate, test and refine all of our pieces of work. We find the more time and collaboration put into preparation the greater the success or impact.
To prepare both abstracts and presentations (once accepted), Emily had several meetings with Emma and Sarah separately and as a team. It was important that Sarah with her huge understanding of the relationship between public health and leisure was able to demonstrate visually how the Lifestyle Hub reduces the workload for GPs in her way. Likewise, through collaborating, Emma’s key message was designed to hit GPs where they are at, and very much from her perspective as a Family GP.
Everyone knows the saying “Prior preparation prevents poor performance”, so we made sure that we did our homework. With our slides, we needed to make them stand out and grab the audience’s attention and specifically for the Lifestyle Hub presentation we only had 1 slide and 5 minutes to communicate our message. Sarah’s presentation had to be succinct, clear and we wanted to grab our audience by challenging them with a question to finish.
We enlisted the help of our TaAF designer Francis, who was able to design a visual depiction that explained the Lifestyle Hub model at a glance. We then decided to go one step further and create a postcard handout of the slide and through a QR code links the reader to our website if they wanted to know more or get in touch.
Dr Emma’s slides contained two pre-recorded videos that were great at reinforcing the message but also, as the allocated time was a little longer this broke up the presentation into smaller sections giving the listener different perspectives on the messaging.
Capturing the presentations
We took plenty of photos and tweeted a bit, but there was an instant impact from recording Sarah’s 5-minute presentation. We were able to share with our team and wider via social media, which led to connections at the conference and afterwards. The recording has become a valuable resource that can be used on our website and as a succinct explanation of how the lifestyle hub is working and it allows us to continue to ask for contributions from those working in the areas.
Ripple effect & connections
Attending events such as this, is all about making connections, while we are still initiating and growing these connections there were a few ways we feel these came easy to us.
- Emma’s active social media presence, connecting with others before and during the conference.
- Sarah’s visual 1 slide- 5 minute presentation, was delivered concisely and concluded with specific questions to the audience for their perspectives triggering a flurry of emails in the following days.
- Emily took part in a Walk, Talk, Walk early one morning which offered a great informal opportunity to link with GPs across the UK and Europe.
As a result of attending the conference, we have already noticed some unique ripples and connections that will help to both strengthen and spread our work.
- Sarah has received several enquiries from across England to share how the Lifestyle Hub functions.
- Emma has been interviewed by the British Journal of Medicine for a podcast and interviews on BBC Radio Lancashire.
- We made great new friends with Dr Hussain Al-Zubaidi and Dr Andrew Boyd, who lead the Royal Colleges Physical Activity workstream and are promoting the Active Practice Charter.
- Justine Bromley, Interim Head of Place for Sport England, joined us in London as a great support for our approach and to take back some learning to Sport England colleagues.
- Emily has made new connections with journal editors and is exploring ways of sharing our learning with the health community.
Overall, the conference was a huge success! We took a leap of faith as this felt like the natural next step to share our work. But for the first time, we were a little apprehensive about being in a new space, testing to see if our messages would land and be well received.
Safe to say the impacts were exactly what we were hoping for. Not only were we being able to share the work of the TaAF programme with others, but we received valuable learning and connections to embed and strengthen our work across Pennine Lancashire.