Spring Goal Setting

Thank you. And what would you say to our members who have diabetes, who are part of the health shared community, in terms of trying to motivate them to take on new health goals in the spring? Well, we start very much with setting smart goals. So little steps, making things measurable, going, you know patients sometimes say I'm going to lose a great deal of weight, trying to get them to set a target for weight loss if that's what they want to do, but working in partnership with patients to set up goals for them, improving their diet, improving their activity and focusing much more on the four pillars of health and not just on medication. So looking much more at nutrition, relaxation and sleep as well as movement and activity. Thank you and of the eight health behaviours and 12 characteristics is there one that your patients with diabetes seem to connect with most? Well it's difficult to say because we try and encourage them to connect with all eight. I suppose stress management is something that is often regarded as being quite challenging and engaging with healthcare because sometimes the patients feel they haven't reached their targets, they can feel that they've failed. So it's supporting them not to feel that they've failed but to see it as being a starting point for making change. And also, I must say, getting adequate sleep is very important because we all know that inadequate or poor quality sleep definitely causes worsening of all the diabetes parameters. And how do you see health-shared communities contributing to diabetes support in the spring months? Very much giving people the ability to share information, to support each other. We know that from all the programmes that have been run previously, educational programmes and so on, that everybody takes on the information to some extent or another, but once they've stopped attending these groups, they forget or they lose the incentive and the motivation. so continuing to be able to share and encourage each other is where we've seen the biggest changes made and being able to expand this would be hugely useful.