Think-tank petitions for a Wellbeing Centre for Wales

This blog, written by Lles Cymru Wellbeing Wales’ Executive Director Dafydd Thomas, contributes to the Wikiprogress Series on Networks. It explains the need for a new Wellbeing Centre for Wales and proposes that those who support the cause sign this petition.

To coincide with National Feel Good Day, an organization that aims to influence and inform the debate about wellbeing in Wales launched an ambitious Wellbeing Manifesto that calls on the Welsh Government to establish a new Wellbeing Centre for Wales, aimed at making increased wellbeing the number-one goal of public policy in Wales.

The Centre, which is the brainchild of not-for-profit think-tank Lles Cymru Wellbeing Wales and has the support of other charities across Wales, such as the Women’s Institute, would be a world-class centre aimed at putting individual and community wellbeing at the heart of Welsh politics. Drawing inspiration from prestigious policy institutes like the award-winning Centre for Social Justice, it would combine the expertise of those with a track record of effective political engagement and policy-making; those with experience of delivering grassroots wellbeing initiatives, including the voluntary sector; as well as academics and academic networks.

Lles Cymru Wellbeing Wales’s Executive Director, Dafydd Thomas, outlines the background to the proposal: “Since 1998, when government first set out its aims to improve wellbeing in Wales in Better Health Better Wales, we have seen big strides forward in wellbeing policy, such as the draft Social Services and Wellbeing Bill, which prioritizes wellbeing outcomes. 

But there are still issues that need addressing. Wellbeing policy often works on a ‘one-size-fits-all’ basis, even though evidence shows that local contexts need to be taken into account.  A concerted effort is required by multiple agencies, working together, to realize the wellbeing ambitions in the legislative programme - as no one agency has a monopoly on wellbeing. A Wellbeing Centre for Wales would be a vehicle to focus everyone’s efforts and drive change.”

  

Lles Cymru Wellbeing Wales has also a petition to the National Assembly for Wales to call on the Welsh Government to establish the Centre. Additionally, it is calling on other organisations and individuals to sign the petition in support.

The National Federation of Women’s Institute - Wales is amongst the charities supporting the call. “The National Federation of Women’s Institute - Wales is all about wellbeing; the wellbeing of our members; wellbeing for the recipients of our services.  A Wellbeing Centre would bring clarity and focus to the debate, so that we can be sure of exactly what we need to do to play our part in taking this agenda forward.”

Copies of the Wellbeing Manifesto for Wales are available at:

http://www.wellbeingwales.org/resources/wellbeing-manifesto

To sign the petition visit for a Wellbeing Centre for Wales please visit:

https://www.assemblywales.org/epetition-list-of-signatories.htm?pet_id=907

Dafydd Thomas

Wellbeing Wales: Bridgend Community Weight Management Programme.

Weight loss can be difficult at the best of times. Temptation and easy options lurk round every corner and keeping up an active lifestyle can be difficult when attempting to juggle the many demands of day-to-day life.

In the battle against obesity, Over half of Welsh adults are currently ranked as overweight or obese. 

Gastric bands, pills and restricted diets may provide a solution to the weight issue but the causes of over eating are often rooted in more than just diet. Many factors contribute to people’s behavioral patterns and eating habits are no different. Social, material, economic and environmental  factors all have a bearing on people’s ability to maintain a healthy weight and lifestyle.

The Garw valley in Bridgend, Wales is one area where service providers have really adopted the whole person approach to weight management. Their Weight Management Programme arose from one local GP’s frustration at the lack of local options to support obese patients and their desire to offer patients access to the established ‘slimming on referral’ schemes offered by the commercial weight management organisations.

From this the Weight Management Programme was born. The programme aimed to work to integrate health and leisure services as a non-clinical intervention for weight management. The programme involved shaping behaviour through group activities that maintained peer support, motivation and other social aspects.  The programme involved referral and support from primary care, the Weight Watchers scheme, the exercise referral scheme and signposting to community activities to aid sustainable health promoting behavior change.

Dafydd Thomas, Executive Director at Lles Cymru Wellbeing Wales was commissioned to pilot a wellbeing assessment process to explore the range of factors affecting the participants, their wellbeing and in turn their ability or motivation to manage their weight. 

The assessment explored the Weight Management Programme participant’s own subjective assessments of their wellbeing, grounded in the specific context of their community and experience using indicators that they themselves developed.

To read the report summery then please click here. We'd love to hear your thoughts on it so why not drop us an e-mail at admin@wellbeingwales.org 

Wellbeing Wales

Measuring our progress: The power of well-being. The nef report.

It’s now been almost three months since the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced that the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) will measure the nation’s well-being, “measuring our progress as a country, not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life.” Since then the ONS has been holding a national debate about what progress (‘national well-being’) means to people and how it is best measured.

An important strand of the ONS’s work on well-being involves choosing 4 or 5 subjective well-being questions to include in the Integrated Household Survey (IHS) – the largest source of UK social data after the census – and deciding how these will fit into the broader concept of national well-being. An announcement on which questions will be used in the first instance is to be made on Thursday, but as the National Statistician, Jil Matheson, has explained, the resulting data will not determine the form of all future measurement, but will be regarded as ‘experimental statistics’, offering scope for further changes to the measurement process.

As a contribution to both the national debate and ONS’s deliberations about measurement, we – the Centre for Well-being at the nef (the new economics foundation) – have published our latest report: Measuring our progress: The power of well-being.

The report begins by reflecting on the range of recent initiatives which have all aimed to redress the over-emphasis on GDP as the dominant measure of social progress. The OECD, the Stiglitz Commission, Eurostat, Beyond GDP and many others have developed measurement frameworks which attempt to capture progress more meaningfully. There has been a broad consensus among them on the need to consider the environment alongside well-being and more objective conditions. The Stiglitz Commission in particular defined progress in terms of the economy, the environment and quality of life, whilst the OECD considered the relationship between the human system and the ecosystem. The nef report develops these ideas but separates the means (resources and human systems) and the ends (the goal of high well-being for all) that, measured together, capture the progress of our nation (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Conceptual framework for societal progress

The key relationship in this framework is between resources and goals: how efficient are we at achieving the goal we want – high well-being for all – given our limited planetary resources? This will largely depend on how efficient our human systems – things like the economy, democracy, peace, and other human activities – are at using resources sustainably, and also how efficient these human systems are at delivering high well-being for all citizens.

In the UK, the immediate responsibility of the ONS is to decide how this goal – well-being – is best conceived of and measured. We argue that it is best understood in terms of the dynamic model of well-being, first developed as part of the UK Government Office of Science Foresight project on mental capital and well-being. It uses the concept of ‘flourishing’ – functioning well in interactions with the world and as a result feeling good about life. The model (Figure 2) describes how people’s external conditions (such as their income, employment status, housing and social context) act together with their personal resources (such as health, resilience and optimism) to allow them to function well and feel good. The model really emphasises the idea that well-being is about more than just happiness – it’s also about having good relationships, autonomy, competence and a sense of purpose, and this is what leads to people feeling happy and satisfied with their life. This report recommends some specific questions that attempt to capture some of this complexity.

Figure 2: Dynamic model of well-being

The ONS also has the task of deciding how survey results should be presented: as just a single life satisfaction indicator, as a composite index or as a dashboard of several indicators? And if it decides to use more than one indicator, should it use only subjective indicators or a combination of subjective and objective ones? And which ones? We addressed these questions by considering how measures can be best designed to have public and political resonance. As a result we recommend that the ONS develops a headline index of well-being , reported as the percentage of people who are flourishing. We also recommend that there is a headline measure of well-being inequality, as well as a set of objective indicators of the drivers of well-being. In the long-run we advocate a much broader set of subjective well-being questions is included, to fully capture the lived experience of people in the UK.

But to make the exercise of measurement worthwhile, subjective indicators of well-being need to be designed so that they are used by policy-makers to change the way that policies are developed and implemented. As the Istanbul Declaration states ‘[A] culture of evidence-based decision making has to be promoted at all levels, to increase the welfare of societies’. The full value of well-being measures will only be realised when they are embedded in the processes by which governments aim to improve the lives of their citizens.

Find the new nef report at http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/measuring-our-progress and have your say in the ONS national debate at http://www.ons.gov.uk/well-being.

Blog post by Laura Stoll, The Centre for Well-being, nef

The nef blog: http://www.neweconomics.org/blog