Since Big Life started Being Well Salford with local partners over three years ago, we have had some fabulous successes. Our coaches who work across the city tackle health inequalities have to date:

• completed over 2999 assessments
• accomplished a further 14,548 interventions
• had 1,404 attendances at our groups

Our online report shows some of the great outcomes our participants have achieved. This report has been structured around the personal stories of Dave, Lee, Andy and Georgia who describe some of the impacts. As part of this work, our participants got the opportunity to frame their journey through video blogs. Working with our partners, People’s Voice Media, our participants got training and the equipment to share their journeys with Being Well Salford. We were then able to use these stories to structure our report. It was an exciting moment when we discovered that the intervention we had worked so hard at was the same one they described…and more!

Health Coaching is relatively new to the UK and to be part of a growing movement is exciting. Being involved in Realising the Value has enabled us to embrace this and meet with other wonderful organisations who are also leading in this this approach. We met several groups of colleagues at a Realising the Value workshop back in November who we have stayed in touch with and have formed our Community of Interest around Health Coaching - and we are always keen to work with more.

It’s been great to speak to Help & Care, who are doing very similar work to ourselves, working with a range of people who have long term conditions. Discussing our challenges and our highlights with them has been a great way of not feeling like we are doing this on our own. We also met Penny Newman a GP, Medical Director at Norfolk Community Health and Care NHS Trust and a National Innovation Fellow specialising in health coaching. Penny has done some fabulous workforce development work with people within more clinical settings to start them engaging in a different type of conversation, coaching, to improve their health . We’re excited to be working with her in thinking about Health Coaching as a Social movement over the coming months. Through this we have also been speaking to OSCA who are involved in a large strategic review process into health coaching workforce development.

Our approach has been shown to increase people’s self-efficacy and overall wellbeing. Our ‘people like me’ approach has built community capacity and resilience and we’re excited to help build up this evidence base with our Community of Interest around health coaching and spreading the value of the approach across England. If you’re interested in joining the community and want to build up the evidence base with us please get in contact by leaving comments below and we will be in touch.