Moving healthcare professionals

Moving Healthcare Professionals is a national programme, led by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), to support healthcare professionals to increase their knowledge and skills, and incorporate physical activity within routine care to support quality improvement and better patient outcomes.

The critical role of healthcare professionals to increase activity among people has been highlighted in the national physical activity framework, Everybody Active Every Day, and also supports the government’s Sporting Future strategy, which set an ambition to integrate sport and physical into care pathways.

What is the programme designed to do?

• Provide evidence-based training and support resources for healthcare professionals to improve awareness, knowledge, confidence and skills to promote physical activity to patients to prevent and manage ill health.
• Test how to best embed physical activity within clinical practice so that physical activity conversations, signposting and prescribing become part of normal NHS clinical practice.
• Support the management of patients with long-term conditions, including people with diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.
• Help reduce long-term demand and costs on the NHS.

The programme includes peer-led training courses led by our physical activity clinical champions, e-learning modules, resources to use during consultations such as the award winning Moving Medicine platform (winner of the Royal College of Physicians Excellence in patient care award for person-centred care 2020) and pilots in NHS Trusts to identify how physical activity can be embedded within the care pathway.