Wednesfield North City Councillors Mary Bateman, Councillor Rita Potter and Phil Bateman are very pleased that this week’s big campaign which they have been supporting has turned out to be so very successful!
Wednesfield North Councillors have been working in Partnership with Wolverhampton Lifestyles professional – based at The Hub on Ashmore Park.
The whole idea of the partnership work was to support the work that the City Council promotes at The Hub and reduce the amount of smoking taking place in the Ward.
We demonstrated over the course of the week that the warnings in the Public Health report for Wolverhampton – Public Health Annual Report for 2014/15, was of significance.
The Report stated “Lifestyle Choices: A Time to Start and a Time to Stop“, raises the significant difference between the health outcomes of children and adults within our City compared to regional and national outcomes.
That report signalled the fact that this City had some Lifestyle choices to make.
That report highlighted “that infant mortality rates, obesity in adults and children, smoking in pregnancy and life expectancy for both men and women are worse in Wolverhampton than the average across England.”
It went onto say that “The need to address lifestyle changes has to be at the heart of a preventative approach.” There was a recognition, within the Annual Report and the Public Health Prevention Plan, of the importance of the environment in which we live, work and play including our green spaces and opportunities to promote physical activity and wellbeing.
It was because of that statement that Wednesfield North Councillors took the decision to do more as individual Councillors, to play a full role in trying to warn our constituents of the danger of smoking, and also work hard to ensure that they knew that there was professional help at hand locally in The Hub, lead by Lifestyle professionals geared to help individuals to “Pack Smoking In”.
Over the last 7days we have used Social Media to reach out to almost 4,000 local residents to give them our message.
We are as Councillors delighted that we have reached out to so many of our constituents. We expect the readership statistics on Social Media to climb even further, as there is always a lag when totaling the readers, the impressions and the hits.
But overall we are delighted with the results and some of the messages that have been sent back to us as Councillors by our constituents.
Here is what a few residents had to tell us-
- “60 a day to zero in less than one week. Life changing illnesses ,a request from my then 3 year old Grandson ,and not wanting to be ungrateful to the complete strangers (NHS @ New Cross )who CPR’d me 4 times in 36 hours, would ensure I would not smoke again.
- “I was a 40 à day to Zero similar reasons pity l didn’t do it years earlier.”
- No Fags Since Oct 21st. NHS Nurse Brill
This has been a great campaign and one that points the way forward to how City Councillors can play an influential role in getting information out locally.
We shall of course wrap the statistics up over the next few days, from all sources.
What is Your View!
