Principal Investigator: Dr Kat Bradbury

Project team: Dr Max Western, Dr Stephen Lim, Linda Du Preez, Fay Sibley, Dr Judith Joseph, Professor Lucy Yardley, Dr Chloe Grimmett, Dr Neil Langridge, Christian Brookes, Helen Fisher, Cynthia Russel, Asgar Electricwala, Tom Stokes, Professor Maria Stokes, Dr Paul Clarkson, Cherish Boxall, Dr Katherine Morton, Sara Bolton, Dr David Attwood.

Partners: Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust), Dorset County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust , Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, Health Innovation Wessex (Wessex AHSN), University of Southampton, NHS England, Energise Me, Active Partnerships, Live Longer Better.

Publication: Implementing a Digital Physical Activity Intervention for Older Adults: Qualitative Study

Summary

This Active Lives website has been shown to help older people to increase physical activity. This study aimed to roll out Active lives to make it available to older people living in the community. The steps involved in the project included:

• Identify, approach and influence organisations interested in helping older people to be active in order to find places that could help us roll out Active Lives.

  
  

• Monitor how many people used active lives and how many were actively engaged enough to have what we think was a sufficient ‘dose’ of the intervention to be likely to change their behaviour.

  
  

• Interview people implementing Active Lives and study what happens in meetings to formulate a list of barriers and facilitators to the roll out of active lives.

  
  
  
  

Results

• We worked with a wide range of organisations including AHSNs/HINs, charities which serve older people, physical activity organisations, NHS trusts and NHS England.

  
  

• The website reached 5002 people. 1306 people were engaged enough to view the core content necessary to lead to behaviour change.

  
  

• NHS England were instrumental in us achieving traction in several NHS trusts.

  
  

• Six NHS trusts and one charity agreed to help us roll out active lives.

  
  

• One physical activity partnership was helpful in facilitating relationships with their local NHS trust. Their support helped influence local trusts, build clinician confidence in Active Lives and help put in place strategies to maximise uptake of older people to Active Lives.

  
  

• Other physical activity partnerships and the physical activity sector more broadly chose not to support the implementation of Active Lives.

  
  

  Barriers here were especially focused on the belief that older people are not digitally engaged, that older people will only benefit from in person groups, and some viewed this as a threat to the groups that they were locally facilitating or supporting themselves.

  
  

  We appeared in competition with these organisations and it prevented uptake of several NHS trusts that appeared interested at our initial meetings with us (i.e. the physical activity partnerships became a barrier to NHS uptake as they had influence in these NHS trusts).

  
  

• Facilitators to uptake included confidence in the team, believing in an evidence-based approach, the team being able to allay concerns around digital accessibility, providing organisations with figures on how many people used the website and providing support with how to maximise uptake to active lives. Endorsement by NHSE was also very useful in persuading some NHS trusts to take on Active Lives.

  
  

• Things that slowed roll out down: Complexity in the NHS trusts’ chain of command slowed the sign up to Active Lives, this was problematic in a 12-month project. NHS trusts also required complex and nuanced data security and other digital health forms to be completed and trusts were overly cautious with regards to the perceived digital security risks of the intervention. This caused long delays and used valuable resources.

What have we done?

• We implemented Active Lives in practice across 6 NHS trusts, having direct impact on older people. 5002 used it, of which 1306 were actively engaged to a level which we believe is a sufficient ‘dose’.

• We’ve written a paper on the barriers/facilitators https://aging.jmir.org/2025/1/e64953

What have we learned?

• Despite the short nature of this project, it achieved good impact and was able to support a large amount of people in a short amount of time

• Support from all partners is needed to overcome barriers to implementation.

• Further roll out would require continued engagement work to allay concerns among the NHS and partner organisations