Abstract
The start of 2017 in External Affairs has been quiet on the publicity front, but behind the scenes we have been working hard to lay the foundations for an exciting year ahead.
We started off the new year with an overview of which resolutions are the trickiest to stick to and it may be no surprise that quitting smoking is the most difficult resolution to keep, by some margin. Of those who resolved to stub out the cigarettes this time last year, three in five had started smoking again by 31 January and as few as 13% were still smoke-free 1 year later. The most successful resolution made was to improve relationships with friends and family, with three in five still keeping to this after a year.
Young Health Movement Workshop
In February, 28 Portland Place hosted 20 young people aged 14–22 years from around the United Kingdom for a Young Health Movement (YHM) workshop. The External Affairs team gave presentations on a range of topics such as drugs, alcohol, tobacco and mental health to stimulate conversation about how these issues affected young people and the strategies they felt might mediate the damaging impacts.
A ‘freestyle’ session was held in the afternoon where the young people raised the health issues they felt were most pertinent. Exam pressure and friendships emerged as key causes of stress, and that stress levels were a significant problem at school. Students felt that it wasn’t easy to talk to teachers about mental health or wellbeing, and councillors at school were not readily available. It transpired that drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, were readily available to the majority of the young people present, directly or indirectly, and social situations made it harder to refuse. However, they felt that these substances had become ‘forbidden fruit’ through the current education and social attitudes. They felt that a more informed realistic approach was necessary to tackle drugs risks. Body image came up as a key issue in the ‘freestyle’ session, with pressure to look a certain way mounting through social media channels. Throughout the day, all groups developed excellent policy suggestions for tackling these problems. The Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) Report team picked the best policy suggestion at the end of the day: the introduction of compulsory training on mental health during the Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) stage of a teacher’s training. This would ensure that eventually almost all teachers would be equipped with a better understanding of mental health to apply in their methods of teaching and inform their interactions with students. Overall, the findings and innovative ideas from the day will go on to inform the work of the policy team moving forward.
Mental Health and Social Media
One of the key findings of the YHM workshop was the impact of social media on mental health. Research is now underway to inform a policy report exploring how social media influences health and wellbeing. Different social media platforms will be assessed comparatively, and we’ll be exploring how society can mitigate the impact that social media has on health.
Smoke and Mirrors
In April, RSPH updated our policy paper on e-cigarettes and vaping to take account of recent developments and the latest research, since our last paper was published in August 2015. As well as updating the evidence on e-cigarettes as a harm reduction tool, we examined in more detail what more retailers could do to embrace e-cigarettes, as well as better understanding the sales practices of vape shops.
Working Collaboratively
We have a range of new partnerships lined up, and exciting projects well underway, including the following:
Our collaborative research project with the Portman Group aimed at better understanding how health information, including calorie information, should be presented is published in the spring of 2017. It follows on from research which suggests the vast majority of the public either don’t know or underestimate how many calories are contained in typical alcoholic drinks;
In terms of the wider public health workforce the spring will see two further pieces of work being published. We were commissioned by Public Health England to develop resources to assist healthcare professionals, including pharmacists, Allied Health Professionals, nurses and dental staff to better measure their impact. In May, we will publish, in partnership with the Professional Standards Authority, a collaborative piece of work aimed at examining the role of the Accredited Registered Workforce in supporting the public’s health;
Our drugs policy paper, ‘Taking a New Line on Drugs’, is continuing to create waves. We’ve met with drugs charity The Loop to discuss drugs testing at festivals, to further our mission of mitigating the negative health impact of drugs on users;
Following on from our highly successful collaboration with Slimming World in 2016, publishing the Child’s Obesity Strategy, we are working together on another new and exciting piece of research aimed at better understanding how unhealthy conversations may be harming our health;
We also have new partnerships pending with a range of organisations including UK Active, the British Dietetics Association, Gulbenkian Foundation and Vitality Health.
If you are an RSPH member and feel that you may be able to contribute any specialist knowledge to any of the campaigns or research mentioned above, please contact Beatrice Cadwallader, PR and Fundraising Assistant,