Online Health Activ8rlives Provides Answer to NICE Guidelines on Childhood Obesity

HUNTINGDON, U.K. - Oct. 28, 2013 - PRLog -- Aseptika Limited (Activ8rlives (http://www.activ8rlives.com/)), Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, UK:  Key to the new National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) public health guidance 47 on “Managing overweight and obesity among children and young people: lifestyle weight management services” is the recognition that childhood obesity is not currently being addressed in the long-term in England. Childhood rates of obesity are levelling off but remain high, with three in every ten children aged between 2 and 15 years being overweight or obese.

The NICE guidelines encourage both parents and children to self monitor from home, tracking their activity, meals, snacks, and sedentary behaviours. It is hoped that parents can better address unhealthy habits, encourage habitual activity and make better food choices for their children and themselves.

Activ8rlives can be used as a tool by weight management specialists employed by Local Authorities and the NHS, to implement programmes based on the guidance issued by NICE by:

·         Taking a whole family approach;

·         Empowering the family to understand their patterns of behaviour using a tool kit for self monitoring; and

·         Supporting the family to adopt the small and sustainable behavioural changes, which together make a long-term difference.

Activ8rlives provides its online tools for the whole family or other groups to track activity, body weight, food and drink consumption, with the ability to track up to 6 other specific parameters, which might include: laps of a swimming pool, hours spent watching TV, dress size, walks to school, packets of crisps, portions of fruit and vegetables, etc. This is all available within a safe and secure online environment in which members of private groups can share messages of encouragement and motivation, similar to Facebook but is closed to the public for the protection of children using the site under parental management.

The Company's secure site has a simple infrastructure, which can also be used by healthcare providers to deliver lifestyle programmes by providing remote mentoring, and online monitoring (where an online coach helps the participant achieve their goals), encouragement and support once a family has undertaken a typical 8-12 week lifestyle training programme face-to-face.

This helps providers follow the NICE guidance by:

·         Providing long-term support after the programme (for the recommended 8-24 months);

·         Ongoing tracking and reporting of the success of the support programmes delivered; and

·         Being flexible and fitting around the work patterns of the family.

NICE regard interventional costs of up to £1,000 per child as reasonable, if there is a permanent reduction in Body Mass Index (BMI) of just 3%. However, reductions in BMI achieved during most programmes are reversed just 6 months after they have been completed. This investment is questionable if families are not provided with the tools needed to manage alone once the motivation provided by being part of a programme has ended and the support withdrawn – the support has to be maintained, even if at arm’s length.

If investments of up to £1,000 per child are to be considered good value for money, Local Authorities and the NHS need to embrace social media techniques alongside personal meetings, rather than rely only on traditional expensive face-to-face interactions. The need for meetings reduce with time, particularly once the learning from these programmes has been incorporated into family life. Communication using social media can then be used to maintain motivation and be promoted as a way of building participant-led and self-supporting communities online.

It is timely to consider doing things differently. Time to exploit the ubiquitous digital media that most of us now use in our personal lives, on Smartphones and Tablets. Time to move public health in the direction of the Government's strategy of delivering services "Digitally by Default". This is considerably less expensive for the provider to deliver, as well as being easier for the family with young children to manage and inexpensive to maintain long-term connection.

Activ8rlives has been created to enable this practise to be deployed and is already being used in this way.

We do, however, question NICE's guidance that trained healthcare providers should have to weigh the participants enrolled on their lifestyle programmes on clinically validated weighing scales and should have to calculate BMIs for them during each contact they have thereafter.  We are surprised at the seemingly contradictory advice that self measured weight and height data should be discounted, while at the same time encouraging self reported food diaries and activity logs as a way of changing behaviour. Would it not have longer term benefits to teach us how to do ALL of this for ourselves using simple Smartphone Apps to do the maths, so that we become responsible for our behaviour patterns? Would it not be more cost effective to prescribe accurate consumer-level electronic weighing scales than to pay the salaries of healthcare workers to weigh us every week on clinically validated scales? Paraphrasing an old saying seems particularly apt: "Give us a fish and we can feed ourselves for a day, but give us a fishing rod (and teach us how to use it) and we can feed ourselves for life!" A classic approach of "see one, do one, teach one",  to healthcare education can then take place within the family home. We urge continued consideration of whether it is better to pay our valuable healthcare workers to weigh us at every face-to-face meeting or whether it is more cost effective to teach us all of the technical skills we need so as to self manage our health and that of our families.

In summary, NICE's guidance is a great beginning but has a long way to go if we are ever to transfer the technical skills from our healthcare workers to those they serve, so as to achieve lasting empowerment of the family in taking control of their health. If we are not taught these skills, how can we ever learn and make permanent changes?

If we always do what we have always done, we will always get what we have always got. Perhaps it is time to think in different ways and to begin to use the low cost technologies that are with us at work, at home, that we wear and carry with us, alongside and as part of face-to-face education programmes?

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For more information on Aseptika Ltd and Activ8rlives and products, please visit: http://www.activ8rlives.com and follow us on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/activ8rlives) or LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/company/activ8rlives-com) .


Activ8rlives Family Health and Wellbeing system includes everything you need to work as a family to be more active and to maintain a healthy body weight.


For press information, please contact:

Jessica Auton, Marketing Director, Aseptika Ltd (Activ8rlives)

jessica.auton@aseptika.com