Sir Muir Gray has announced the launch of a National Activity Therapy Service / Jack Emmerson
Sir Muir Gray has used the HCM Summit to announce the launch of a National Activity Therapy Service – challenging health and fitness operators to help turn activity into a routine part of prevention, treatment and support for independent living.
“This is the 22nd October declaration,” he said. “We launch it today in this room, because that’s the way things happen. Some problems are too complicated for bureaucracies.”
The initiative aims to unite fitness professionals, GPs, community organisations and other partners around shared objectives: identifying people who could benefit from activity, connecting them with appropriate local opportunities and securing investment to support delivery.
Gray’s ambition is to establish a national network with local delivery, bringing the sector’s facilities, expertise and coaching skills into closer partnership with health and social care.
“The NHS and social care are in crisis,” Gray told HCM. “But there’s no point just pouring more money in. We’ve got to reduce the need for healthcare and social care, and activity is the single best way of doing that, both for prevention and for helping people with long-term conditions recover what they’ve lost by immobility.”
He urged operators to recognise both the public health contribution they could make and the commercial opportunity in helping more people remain active into their 70s, 80s and 90s.
“The National Activity Therapy Service brings together most of the people in what’s called the fitness industry, but it will bring a lot of health people in – GPs and others,” he said.
“The plan is to have a single set of objectives, identify people who could benefit from activity – everyone – and link them to local resources and to invest to enable this to happen.”
His starting point is a challenge to assumptions about ageing. Chronological ageing, loss of fitness, disease and social disadvantage are distinct processes, he explained, but their effects are often bundled together and treated as inevitable decline.
Loss of fitness can begin decades before old age, as sedentary jobs, car journeys and environments that discourage everyday movement reduce activity. Illness can accelerate that decline, partly through its social consequences: people move less, spend time in hospital and find others taking over tasks they previously managed themselves.
Although well-intentioned, doing everything for someone can remove opportunities to maintain strength, confidence and independence. Eventually, the gap between their capabilities and the demands of daily life can become large enough for them to require social care.
Ageism compounds the problem, while deprivation affects people’s opportunities to remain healthy and active throughout their lives.
“We don’t blame people for their lifestyle,” Gray said. “It’s an environmental problem.”
He called for a broader understanding of activity, encompassing physical, cognitive and emotional wellbeing. Music, dance, painting and gardening could all contribute, alongside exercise delivered in gyms and leisure centres.
For the National Activity Therapy Service, Gray envisages shared objectives delivered through local networks, with annual reporting to reveal differences in provision and help communities learn from one another.
He used a Japanese organisational analogy to explain the approach: a rugby team working together, rather than a relay race in which instructions pass from senior management through successive layers to the front line.
The service would connect existing organisations and resources, with neighbourhood partnerships deciding how best to meet their population’s needs.
Gray challenged HCM to help build a casebook documenting work already taking place that would help operators share practical experience and demonstrate what activity services can deliver.
Activity prescribing offers one route into a closer partnership with healthcare. Gray highlighted the ongoing Wellness Interactive Support Hub initiative that can generate digital activity prescriptions linked to a person’s diagnosis and postcode. The programme’s stated objective is to support clinicians by issuing those prescriptions automatically.
He described a consultation in which entering a diagnosis or medication would trigger recommendations for suitable local opportunities and information, giving someone an activity prescription alongside their medical treatment. He told delegates a further launch was planned for November, with ambitions to extend the approach to around 10 further parts of England before the end of the year.
His vision reaches beyond GP surgeries and health clubs. Pharmacists could sell weights and simple exercise equipment, while strength training could take place wherever older women already gather, including churches, mosques and synagogues.
People receiving support would be described as “partners”, with knowledge, encouragement and responsibility to participate in improving their health.
For operators, Gray’s immediate call was to build relationships with local GPs, community organisations and MPs, and make the case for physical activity’s contribution to maintaining independence.
He also called for clearer activity guidance for people with multiple long-term conditions and those receiving social care, recognising that age alone says little about an individual’s capabilities or support needs.
“People in their 70s, 80s and 90s should be actively welcomed into gym membership,” he said. “They represent a substantial, varied market whose potential is obscured when ageism leads providers to treat everyone of the same age as alike.”
Gray suggested families rethink their Christmas presents: a gym membership for grandparents could offer more lasting value than wine or chocolates.
The opportunity is to help people retain the strength, confidence and skills needed to live their lives while creating a wider role for the sector in the communities it serves. “We know that everyone can get stronger, more supple, more skilful,” he said. “They just need to become more active.”
Gray also urged delegates to read the Health and Social Care Committee’s report, Healthy Ageing: physical activity in an ageing society, published in May. Its recommendations include commissioning evidence-based exercise programmes to reverse frailty, reduce falls and help prevent or delay dementia, and making better use of the leisure sector’s facilities and workforce.
