Abstract
Background: Awareness of physical activity guidelines are low, particularly the “forgotten guidelines” of strength and balance. Increasing awareness of guidelines, but also of appropriate local services that can be utilised, is an important step towards active ageing. Co-creation can inform tailored service provision to potentially increase uptake and adherence. The aim was to co-create recommendations to redesign and promote local leisure services, emphasising strength and balance activity provision. Method: Twenty-four ageing and older adults engaged in 10 co-creation workshops. Workshops consisted of interactive tasks, and fieldwork tasks were undertaken externally. Data were collected using field notes, worksheet tasks and facilitator reflections and were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Results: Retention and adherence rates were 92% and 85%. Co-creators cited group cohesion, scientific input from experts and perceived knowledge development as enjoyable elements of the process. Four key themes emerged from analysis: (1) localised strategies for awareness raising, (2) recruitment of volunteer champions to increase uptake and maintenance, (3) accessibility of activities, including what they are and when they are, and (4) evaluation of impact. Conclusion: This has been the first study, to our knowledge, to utilise co-creation for informed leisure service provision improvement. Future work should aim to implement these recommendations to ascertain what impact these themes might make.
Highlights
Despite the significant contribution that physical activity (PA) has on maintaining health and wellbeing in later years, levels of PA rapidly decline with age [1]
Fewer than half of individuals who reach the cardiovascular recommendations meet the strength and balance guidelines, demonstrating a need to promote the importance of muscle and bone strengthening and balance activities (MBSBA) throughout the lifecourse [4,5,6]
A variety of stakeholders engaged in this process, including: end-users, researchers specialising in co-creation and strength and balance, and public health officers
Summary
Despite the significant contribution that physical activity (PA) has on maintaining health and wellbeing in later years, levels of PA rapidly decline with age [1]. Despite the importance of all domains of PA for adults and older adults, within PA, guidelines for health, muscle and bone strengthening and balance activities (MBSBA) are considered ‘the forgotten guidelines’ [2,3]. Increasing awareness of guidelines, and of appropriate local services that can be utilised, is an important step towards active ageing. Co-creation can inform tailored service provision to potentially increase uptake and adherence. The aim was to co-create recommendations to redesign and promote local leisure services, emphasising strength and balance activity provision. Four key themes emerged from analysis: (1) localised strategies for awareness raising, (2) recruitment of volunteer champions to increase uptake and maintenance, (3) accessibility of activities, including what they are and when they are, and (4) evaluation of impact. Conclusion: This has been the first study, to our knowledge, to utilise co-creation for informed leisure service provision improvement. Future work should aim to implement these recommendations to ascertain what impact these themes might make
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