| Pedometers, which measure the footsteps taken by users in a bid to encourage exercise, are also being given out as part of the BBC’s Fat Nation Challenge.
But a Dundee GP with a special interest in heart disease said today that people had to be motivated and supported by health professionals to really benefit from pedometers.
Dr Alex Watson, a GP at Westgate Health Centre, said evidence showed that people with heart disease had to want to change. Simply sending them off with a pedometer without instruction and follow-up was not usually enough.
Dr Watson was speaking after a presentation to members of Dundee Local Health Care Co-operative, the organisation that represents local doctors and other community-based health services.
At the organisation’s meeting in Kings Cross Hospital, members agreed to purchase extra pedometers for the use of chronic heart disease patients.
The organisation had previously bought 300 pedometers, which were distributed among GP surgeries in the city and were also available to those involved in weight-loss programmes.
Dr Watson said the funding was used not just to purchase pedometers, but to provide training for health professionals working with patients trying to reduce their weight and exercise more to cope with chronic heart disease.
Shona Black, a specialist nurse involved in developing services for heart-disease patients, said, “You get pedometers with a McDonald’s salad and from the Fat Nation Challenge on the BBC, but the evaluation of them is not as rigorous as some other things have been.”
She said the British Heart Foundation had shown there were demonstrable benefits when patients worked with a specialist nurse and used pedometers.
Nurses were looking at working with fitness instructors in Dundee leisure centres where there were programmes for cardiac patients. She said the plan was to offer patients pedometers to increase their activity on the days they did not attend exercise classes.
Dr Watson, chairman of the LHCC’s chronic heart disease steering group, said pedometers were effective when “clinically directed”.
“It’s like smoking cessation,” he said, implying that it wasn’t enough to hand people nicotine replacement therapy and then send them away.
“You have to have a support system round about them, offer follow-up, review patients, ask them how they are getting on, see what you can do to help.”
Mrs Black said patients had to be ready to change and be motivated. “There is no point giving pedometers to patients not motivated, not ready to change” she said. |
