The Cheshire and Merseyside Women’s and Children’s Services Partnership – Improving Me, is a partnership of 27 NHS organisations across Cheshire and Merseyside aiming to improve the experience of women and children. Recently, further collaboration has taken place with Active Cheshire and MSP, linked to the Health and Care Partnership.
The focus of this group of organisations is supporting pregnant women and early years. During COVID19, pregnant women have become more isolated during a time that should be happy and one of welcoming their new baby into the world.
Prior to COVID19, the collaboration submitted a plan to help ensure that physical activity levels for pregnant women from a BAME background were increased, along with early years interventions for 0-5 years with their families. However, a call-to-action to implement some short-term interventions was asked of both MSP and Active Cheshire and of course, we said yes!
MSP were already partnered with Juanita Steel, who delivers physical activity sessions to women from many backgrounds, but mainly those who are inactive. She also had a wealth of expertise in safe exercise for pregnant women. This resulted in live Facebook, YouTube videos available for any pregnant women for free, encouraging them to be active at home and in a safe environment. This was something different for us that we had not developed before and it was a great opportunity to try something new. The videos were supported by the launch of a dedicated web page on the MSP site.
The impact of the live sessions saw over 700 individual views from 26 live and recorded videos on YouTube and over 600 Facebook views. A new Facebook group currently has 94 members engaged.
Comments included:
‘”Just done this workout, loved it thank you so much’ ‘Thank you for making these available on YouTube. I miss the live sessions due to working from home so I catch up on them later in the evening.”
“I love doing these later on as just working at the moment, but it was good to watch live so I could check if I could do the exercises first.”
“Really enjoyed this, will deffo be joining all the sessions.”
“Amazing workout – thank you so much and looking forward to completing more.”
MSP and Active Cheshire are now currently working together to take this project even further, going forward with a more targetted approach to support locations with the greatest need.
We look forward to bringing you another update in MSP’s next roundup!
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