Healthcare Digital October 2021 | Page 73

DIGITAL HEALTH

• 7,200 gyms and leisure centres

• 2,100 funded by local authorities

• 10.4 million people had memberships before the pandemic

• £ 1 billion spent by local authorities each year on sport , leisure and green spaces

Paul McPartlan ' s career has mostly revolved around healthcare . He joined Places Leisure in August 2020 , after working as National Operations Director for Nuffield Health , where he was responsible for 31 hospitals and over 300 fitness and wellbeing sites .

Before that he was UK Managing Director for GenesisCare and a Hospital Director for private healthcare provider BMI Healthcare . receive free school meals , which caused the UK government to u-turn after voting against it . " All children that are entitled to free school meals will get free swimming lessons . We think that ' s something which will really gain traction and fits perfectly with our social enterprise model . The latest estimate is something like 1.2 million children will leave primary school now unable to swim , exacerbated by the pandemic . The COVID recovery programme is very similar in regards to ensuring that we ' re actually trying to make a difference locally , and socially ."

Places Leisure already works closely with CCGs and doctor ' s practices on programmes for smoking cessation , obesity and weight management . " These are prescribed programmes where we contract with the CCG to deliver outcomes . I think with Long COVID it will move into a recorded outcome measure type of activity .

In the future McPartlan sees the role of community leisure services changing to work even more closely with local healthcare providers . " I think we ' ll have a new model which will be broader than the old traditional model of , here ' s a gym with a swimming pool , here are some classes , we open our doors , we encourage people to join , we get paid for that and then we close the doors . I think we ' ll move into a broader

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