When you want to work with the NHS, you need to create trust and don’t ask them for money, because the door will shut

Tell us about Plymouth Active
Plymouth Active was formed in April 2022, when Plymouth City Council brought leisure back in-house to have more control and link it into the wider strategic plan to use physical activity with public health to tackle inequalities.

We run four facilities, the biggest one being the Plymouth Life Centre, which opened in 2012, around the diving legacy of Tom Daley who comes from Plymouth.

It has a 50 metre pool with movable floors, a leisure pool and a diving pit. There’s also a climbing wall, a gym, a 12-court sports hall, indoor bowls, squash courts and trampolining. It’s a very popular facility, recording about 1.5 million visits a year.

We also run Plympton Swimming Pool and Gym and two seasonal seawater lidos – Tinside and Mount Wise.

What are the demographics of the city?
Plymouth has a population of around 275,000, of which we engage with about 55,000. Some parts of the city are in the top 10 most deprived areas in the UK and there's a 10-year life expectancy gap between different areas.

What are you doing about health inequalities?
Our job is to create an active wellbeing service. Getting inactive people moving a bit more, whether that’s walking, gardening or coming to one of our facilities and just getting involved is what motivates me. It gives us the opportunity to change people's lives and that’s priceless.

Our Active Health Programme has now been running for a year, in collaboration with Plymouth YMCA and Good Boost. It targets people who have never used us and have some sort of health condition, the most frequent being mental health issues, being overweight or pre-diabetic. We connect with social prescribers and referral pathways to offer free access at certain times so they can swim and use the EGYM circuit in the Life Centre gym. Free access is given for eight weeks, after which people are offered a half-price membership.

In the first 12 months, we received 260 referrals and accepted 90 per cent onto the eight week programme. Of that 90 per cent, 21 per cent have continued with us on a paid half-price direct debit membership. I'm super pleased with that as they’re all people we wouldn’t have reached otherwise and that creates a ripple effect. Those visits also give me evidence and unbelievable case studies to show my cabinet members and my council.

What’s the biggest barrier for this cohort?
The Life Centre is a big, scary building – it’s noisy and busy and people assume they don’t belong. At the start, our Active Health lead, William Hickey, meets them at the back door and welcomes them in. However, after a couple of weeks they realise there are people like them at the centre and that they do belong.

Cost is also a big issue. It’s one of the main reasons people leave after eight weeks. We hope they’ll have developed an exercise habit and will continue walking in the park or swimming in the sea, because we've got amazing green and blue spaces across the city.

Are you working with the NHS?
One of our members who was referred to the Active Health Programme because of Parkinson's disease, connected us with her daughter who works in the physiotherapy department at Plymouth’s Derriford Hospital and after a lot of discussion over six months, the hospital’s knee and hip physiotherapy department has been relocated to the Life Centre.

The team has taken over one of our studios and we've adapted the gym, given them some office space and a consultation room. It was appealing to them because of the EGYM circuit, the free parking and easy accessibility.

As a result of that collaboration we've now got the hospital’s pain team wanting to talk to us and we're having wider conversations with the NHS across Devon, including the Falls Prevention Team, cancer care and tier-three weight loss services.

When you want to work with the NHS, you need an advocate on their side of the fence and to create trust. Don’t ask them for any money, because the door will shut.

Find out their pain points and where you have shared purpose, keep the conversations flowing and developing and change slowly happens.

How are you dealing with budget cuts?
We have politically strong support for what we're doing, but councils are experiencing dire financial issues, so it means we have to keep strong on the commercial side. There are also a lot of budget gyms in the city, so we have to be smart about what we do.

At the moment we’re looking to maximise swimming and diving lessons, as well as creating bolt-on services to add value to memberships, such as telehealth. Fitness memberships are doing well and are growing by about 12 per cent year-on-year.

We’re also committed to diversifying and creating new opportunities around food, beverage and events. A great example of this happened recently, when Tinside Lido was a location for Rolls-Royce to celebrate 100 years of the Phantom. The lido was used as the backdrop for a high-profile photo shoot, recreating the famous Keith Moon story of a Rolls Royce in a swimming pool. The shoot gained national coverage, including in Rolling Stone UK and showcased how our venues can be used in creative and memorable ways.

Another way we’ve maximised the commercial offering is by creating a brand called HY-NRG. We had a studio that was empty 90 per cent of the time, so worked with Stronger Wellness to repurpose it.

Although Pilates is popular there are already a dozen studios in Plymouth, however there were no HIIT studios, so we created a brand around a 45-minute workout, in a cool looking space, with new instructors. We’ve wrapped membership of this into a package called Active Premium, which also gives access to the climbing wall and longer booking rights. We run 25 classes a week and usually average about six people, so it’s like small group training. The business plan was to get 200 Active Premium members and we did that really fast. The feedback has been positive and we're now in the middle of installing Myzone to add to the experience.

What’s coming up?
We have a couple of exciting projects coming with food, beverage and events and a strategic plan being launched in the next six months. We've also got non-executive directors coming on board, who are pretty big hitters and will strengthen our governance.

Otherwise, we'll keep plugging away, trying to get more people, more active, more often. That's really what we’re about.