Staff at East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust (ESNEFT) are offering thousands of patients a year extra support to look after their own health and wellbeing so that they can live longer, healthier and happier lives.
The Making Every Contact Count (MECC) programme encourages staff to use their interactions with patients, such as outpatient appointments, to support them to make positive changes. This could include stopping smoking, eating a healthy diet or taking exercise.
Its aim is to tackle figures which show that people living in the most deprived areas covered by ESNEFT, which include Tendring and central Ipswich, are more likely to smoke, come to hospital as an emergency, be obese or fail to attend appointments.
Sally Barber, Rachel Coles, Karen Lake and Angie Tillett from the health inequalities team
The programme at ESNEFT has so far proved a success, with more than 41,000 offers of support made to patients. Of these, 6,500 have been referred to other organisations, such as stop smoking services.
Targeted projects have also taken place to improve health and wellbeing. These include:
- Holding a 20-week healthy eating programme for children called ‘Nourish’.
- Introducing a stop smoking service for inpatients at Colchester and Ipswich hospitals. This has received over 1,275 referrals so far and helped more than half of those people to quit.
- Providing extra help so that mums-to-be can stop smoking. This has been particularly successful in north east Essex, where the percentage of women smoking at the time of delivery has reduced from 15.4% to 6%.
- Rolling out picture menus on the wards at ESNEFT’s hospitals to encourage healthy eating.
- Working with Essex County Council to reduce park and ride costs in Colchester to encourage more patients to keep their appointments.
The Clacton and Harwich outpatients nursing team
Sally Barber, associate director for health inequalities at ESNEFT, said: “Figures show that there is a significant difference in the quality of life experienced by people in our most deprived areas compared with that enjoyed by those in the least. Tackling health inequalities is therefore a priority for ESNEFT as we want to make sure that everyone gets the same opportunities and access to health and wellbeing support, regardless of where they live.
“We are proud of our Making Every Contact Count programme, which has made a real difference to thousands of people since its launch. Work is now taking place to make sure it becomes business as usual for our teams so that we can help even more people into the future.”
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