I wrote recently about the importance of keeping our ageing population active, both for their mental and physical wellbeing.  If healthcare providers are to support such activity as a preventative measure, they need to get better at prescribing physical activity to patients.

A recent paper from Lancaster University’s Medical School explores how this could be done, via an analysis of the school’s work in integrating the Movement For Movement program into undergraduate medical training.

Movement For Movement is an initiative that has since been shared with all medical schools in the UK.  With physical inactivity rated as the 4th biggest risk factor for global mortality, it attempts to make the medical profession better at persuading people to be active.

Empowering doctors

The vast majority of healthcare work remains devoted to curing people who are sick rather than preventing ill health in the first place, so it’s no real surprise that most medical training is focused in that area.  Of course, you might justifiably argue that doctors are not the best people to be doing such work, and that it would prove a waste of their expensively acquired skills.

I’ve written previously about the work of Vijay Govindarajan, who recommends a ‘hub and spoke’ approach to healthcare, with high-end medical expertise and resources aggregated in the hub and working on challenging cases, with the spokes then going out into communities and working with people on keeping them healthy.  This work can often be done with people whose skillset is dedicated to such tasks, who are often not only better qualified but much cheaper than highly trained doctors.

It is surely a risk to try and focus all attention on the doctor for delivering healthcare, as there may well be better and more scalable ways to support physical activity, and subsequently ward off the threat of conditions such as obesity and diabetes.