We learnt:
Confidence and perceptions are the biggest barriers.
It seems more than half of Greater Manchester’s people are sacrificing their own health for fear of being judged. The three biggest themes of the public conversation regarding barriers to taking charge of their health were:
- confidence, self-awareness, and belief,
- my resources – time and money,
- my environment- local leisure and park facilities, work and public spaces.
The latter two are amplified by the first.
The opportunity:
Interventions that seek to fix the root cause of issues, not the symptoms should be prioritised. This ultimately means helping individuals, at scale, to build self-confidence, self-belief, an understanding of their personal behaviour and to see resourcefulness as more important than resources. Indeed, all existing interventions need to consider how they are tackling these root cause issues. This is no small task but a radical health upgrade will require a radical way of thinking.
