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Choosing Wisely
Choosing Wisely is one strand of our Green and Healthy Frome 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:
Support Groups and Resources
There are some groups and resources available that can support you in making small but important changes to your health
Habits For Health
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 programme.
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 HEALTH AND WELLBEING PAGE VISIT HEALTH CONNECTIONS FROME
Healthier Eating
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 conditions, 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 eating more plants, including some helpful tips and links to other sources of information
Reducing Stress
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 the connecting with community page 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
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 Frome for alcohol resources and information
Being More Active
See our Health and Wellbeing page for local and national support being more physically active / moving more (including active travel).
Stopping Smoking
See our Health and Wellbeing page for local and national support stopping smoking.
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 medication (and encouraging changes to our lifestyles instead)
- deprescribing unnecessary pain medication by encouraging lifestyle changes and encouraging participation in the Ten Footsteps programme - Live Well with Pain.
We will discuss any changes we think we can make to your prescription with you.
For more information and the latest news in the project, please visit the Green and Healthy Frome project website.
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.