The Hale & Hearty project is all about Improving the Health & Wellbeing of People Living in Ireland. The project hopes to achieve this by providing, easy to use, comprehensive Health & Wellbeing information. This involves bringing information together from lots of different sources including Local Authorities, the Central Statistics Office, and Healthcare Providers. This process has involved lot of interesting conversations. In this blog let us look at some of the conversations around physical activity information.

Hale and Hearty have been having conversations with Sports Ireland https://www.sportireland.ie/ and Cork Healthy Cities https://corkhealthycities.com/. This conversations centred around the World Health Organisation’s work on the Social Determinants of Health https://www.who.int/health-topics/social-determinants-of-health#tab=tab_1, the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. International research points to higher participation in physical activity amongst the more well off, leading the better health outcomes. Is there evidence in Ireland that corroborates the international findings?

Interesting international research points to the effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on physical activity, sedentary behaviour and overall health and wellbeing since the WHO declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020. Is there evidence in Ireland in this regard? The consequences of physical inactivity in older adults during these times was raised as a concern. Is this relevant in Ireland?

Covid-19 has taught us the importance of trustworthy, timely, comprehensive and consistent information. Informing policy makers to develop, monitor and adapt policies based on timely information saves lives.

Likewise, good quality information around physical activity can inform better health and wellbeing outcomes. Having physical activity data, by age, gender, socioeconomic status at a local level, over time, is essential to inform where and for whom interventions are appropriate.

Unfortunately, in the case of physical activity this information is just not consistently available as open data in Ireland. The  good news in that the first report on the Well-being Framework for Ireland  launched earlier in July 2021 https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/fb19a-first-report-on-well-being-framework-for-ireland-july-2021/ recognises these information gaps and proposes a Health System Performance Assessment Framework which will report on 260 indicators including physical activity.

Meanwhile the Hale and Hearty project will continue to have these conversations.