Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the National Health Service has any plans to provide more specific exercise advice.

The Chief Medical Officers guidance, Start Active, Stay Active, published in 2011 provides clear, age-specific advice on the volume, duration, frequency and type of physical activity required to achieve general health benefits. For example, adults aged 19-64 should undertake 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity and two sessions of muscle strengthening per week. Public Health England (PHE) has been asked to develop a ‘5-a-day’ style message to ensure we improve the effectiveness of these guidelines in public messaging.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommend that health care professionals identify those who are inactive and provide brief advice with follow-up. This recommendation is routinely delivered with 40–74 year olds through the NHS Health Check. PHE has published practical NHS Health Checks best practice guidance that includes how physical activity should be incorporated as a component of the cardiovascular risk assessment.

Everybody Active Every Day, the physical activity framework for England that PHE coproduced with over 1,000 local and national experts (including from the NHS) was published in October 2014 and highlighted the key role of health professionals to increase physical activity. To support this role, PHE has published a set of free, Continuing Professional Development-accredited e-learning modules covering health and physical activity to support the development of requisite knowledge and skills. PHE is also working with the National Centre for Sports and Exercise Medicine on implementing physical activity interventions into clinical care pathways and with a range of professional health bodies and leaders to develop expertise and leadership across health professionals.