Digital Innovation - Healthy Lifestyles ‘Best You’
The Digital Innovation of the Year Award went to Coventry Healthy Lifestyles Service (HLS), following Stuart Jackson’s work on app, ‘Best-You’. A tool developed six years ago to support people in making lifestyle changes, such as losing weight, quit smoking, get more active and cut down on alcohol consumption.
Coventry HLS partnered with Stuart, founder of ICE Creates, an engagement and behavioural design community, to deliver the 12-week intervention programme and online free self-care platform Best-You.
Best-You is all about inspiring people to create new habits and break old ones, building resilience and wellbeing by allowing users to self-care alongside involvement with the lifestyle service coaches.
Ideas to launch a platform of this kind started with a large piece of research back in 2012 before being launch in 2013. Best-You was founded and sat within Public Health England at a national level as part of one of their pilots for creating whole population wellbeing.
“The platform is all about user tracking and goal setting. Today in real terms there are over 18,000 people on Best-You, we have had 50,000 plus recorded tracked activities, and 12,500 goals set. In the last 12 months we have been running journeys on the platform, which is a specific lifestyle change like healthy weight or reducing alcohol, becoming smoke free or improving mental health over a measured period. We have had 6,800 better life journeys recorded. That gives you a sense of some of the impact of Best-You to date.
“We also know Coventry as a city, measured and recorded as a behaviour change on Best-You at over a tonne of weight lost in just one month alone,” said Stuart.
He tells us the most challenging part of getting Best-You off the ground was pulling people onto the platform and actively using it with limited marketing resource.
“Partnerships and collaborations have been key to the success of Best-You. We have worked hard to achieve face to face work with a cross section of mainly public sector, public health, social care and NHS. This has been through our coaches and the networks and in the future the Primary Care Networks, the Acute Trusts the Social Care Teams, the Social Prescribers are all going to be absolutely vital to getting more people using this wellbeing front door for Coventry.
“We also work with businesses, such as pharmaceutical businesses, FMCG businesses, businesses that are focused on positive change and improving health and wellbeing.”
Stuart was thrilled to win the Digital Innovation Award and believes giving back to the community in a way that helps people build their resilience and become the best versions of themselves is of the highest importance.
“We believe Best-You is ahead of the curve in helping our population make change happen for themselves and are very excited about the impact so far. It can be used by individuals, groups and workplaces and unlike most other social media platforms there is no advertising on the app.
“Best-You promotes community cohesion, creating groups to both share content and behaviour change journeys. We believe this is often an undervalued way of giving back to our community but is important as when communities are activated, great things happen.
“For individuals this tool has improved overall health, mental wellbeing and quality of life. Hundreds of people have lost weight, quit smoking, got more active and cut down on their alcohol consumption by using this tool. In the long-term this means we can also help individuals to reduce the risk of diseases and conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and COPD.
“We don’t believe we can change anyone, but we do believe we can create the environments and opportunities; we can give people support, advice and education and energy to change, but ultimately that change is their choice. Our job is to create a seedbed of change that supports people to grow and become stronger,” he said.