Choosing Wisely

Choosing Wisely is one strand of our Green and Healthy Future partnership and has several different areas of work, including healthy lifestyles, reducing the use of unnecessary medication and reducing unnecessary testing.

Encouraging Healthy Lifestyles

What do we mean by Healthy Lifestyles? By taking some small steps we can all improve our health and wellbeing. We might need to move more, stop smoking, drink less alcohol or eat a healthier diet, for example.

Find out more about the sort of things you can do to improve your health and wellbeing:

General Information

There are some groups and resources available that can support you in making small but important changes to your health

Healthy Lifestyles Group

Do you want to move more and feel healthier? Do you want to meet others and look at topics such as sleep, exercise, healthy eating, hydration, connecting and relaxation? If so, join in with this rolling programme. Come along to one or all the sessions. Join whenever you want.

Sessions take place online, every Tuesday from 2-3pm.

LEARN MORE AND BOOK

Further information

We've shared some ideas and links on ways you can make small changes towards living a healthier life. But there's more information on these, and other topics related to looking after ourselves and self care on our website and also on the Health Connections Mendip website, in their resources section, which you can search by topic:

VISIT OUR SELF-HELP CENTRE VISIT HEALTH CONNECTIONS MENDIP

Stopping Smoking

How to get help to stop smoking

Visit our Self Help Centre for local and national support.

Being More Active

Being more physically active / moving more (including active travel)

Visit our Self Help Centre for local and national support.

Healthy Eating

What does a healthy diet look like?

Eat more plants

The quality of our diet has a huge impact on our health and wellbeing, and it is widely accepted that many medical condi9ons, including heart disease, diabetes and mental health problems, could be prevented improved, and in some cases, cured by a change in diet.

Although we are all different in terms of our food preferences, intolerances and health goals, evidence shows that eating a more whole-food plant-based diet benefits everyone.

Read more about about eating more plants, including some helpful tips and links to other sources of information

Reducing Stress

Times of calm and relaxation are vital for all of us.

Learning to relax

Times of calm and relaxation are vital for all of us.

There are almost no challenges in life that aren’t easier to deal with when we are calm enough, and all medical conditions and mental health problems will be improved by regular times of calm and relaxation.

Sleep well

Good sleep is essential to mental and physical health.

Read some tips on sleeping well

Talking Cafes

Talking Cafes are a place to meet new people, make friends and chat to a Health Connector about activities, support groups and services that are availble in your community.

Visit our Self Help Centre to learn more

Five ways to wellbeing

The following steps have been shown to help improve our wellbeing:

connection
be active
take notice
keep learning
give

Visit Mind to learn more

Drink Less Alcohol

Cutting back on the amount of alcohol you drink can be a really effective way to improve your health, boost your energy, lose weight and save money.

Any reduction in the amount you drink every week will be beneficial – and with the right support, it's easier than you think.

Visit Health Connections Mendip for alcohol resources and information

Reducing the Use of Unnecessary Medication

Our medicines management team is leading on this area of work.

They are looking at when we may be over-prescribing medication to patients and where we can improve the use of different medications. Examples of this include:

use of asthma inhalers - visit Green Inhaler to learn more
reducing the over-prescribing of antidepressants
reducing the over-prescribing of blood pressure medicaiton (and encouraging changes to our lifestyles instead)

We will discuss any changes we think we can make to your prescription with you.

Reducing Unnecessary Testing

There are a lot of areas in general practice where we believe we can reduce testing.

We will discuss this with you if it relates to any tests you are used to receiving.