Childhood obesity crisis blight in North Lincolnshire

Cabinet member for Adults and Health at North Lincolnshire Council, Coun Richard Hannigan, said the authority took childhood obesity very seriously and he earmarked it as  one of the top priorities for its Health and Wellbeing Board.

He added: 'We fully recognise that action must be taken now to reduce obesity levels and improve children and young people's health. 

'We are taking a whole-system approach, working with partners to change the system to one that promotes healthy weight so that being overweight is no longer the norm in North Lincolnshire. The North Lincolnshire Healthy Weight Healthy Lives Strategy aims to provide support for people and their families to live healthier lifestyles. 

'To ensure children are at a healthy weight, we will be developing existing programmes and implementing new initiatives to make improvements working with a range of partners.'

He said the council had already had a high performing children's weight management service called '˜Get Going' delivered by Get Ahead. Get Going have worked with more than 100 families over the past year, achieving an excellent retention rate of 92 per cent completing the eight to 10 week programme with 75 percent of these young people successful in losing weight. Some of the recent actions we taken to tackle obesity include, a workshop to map the council's obesity system, with more than 65 partners taking part, a new inter-school steps challenge called '˜Let's Get Stepping' that will be launched next year.

Get Going also provides prevention programmes in primary schools and a targeted primary school based intervention called Let's Get Healthy 

The Schools Catering service is also taking steps to improve the healthiness of school meals such as, reformulating puddings with 10 per cent less sugar and offering starters as an alternative to puddings. The service is nutritionally accredited (food4life) and has high standards for ingredients, which is seen as an added benefit to the provision of free school meals in Key Stage 1.

 Working with the charity Living Streets to encourage pupils to make more journeys using active methods, including cycling and walking.

For further details on the obesity crisis facing primary aged children see page 5.