Blog

A recent report from The NHS Race and Health Observatory has reviewed the inequalities suffered by black and minority people within the health system. This damning report is incredibly important and needs action to be taken now at all levels.

Obesity is a global pandemic influenced by the food environment and individual choices. Obesity in the UK is amongst the worst in Europe with more than 60% of adults living with overweight or obesity. In England, 20% of year 6 children were classified as living with obesity in 2020 with a prevalence twice as high in the most deprived areas than the least deprived areas. Trends in food consumption are worth looking at as some are important factors contributing to rising levels of obesity (Eg: increasing consumption of meals out of the home).

Being able to access and use the internet is widely acknowledged to be crucial to health, employment, and life-chances in general, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic began. Read how C3's Boscombe (UK) project helped community members overcome their digital exclusion.

October half term is always a challenge for families with uncertain weather but needing to occupy children with fun and physical activity. In Boscombe, United Kingdom, C3’s CHESS Plan Coordinator, Zoe, provided lots of fun, social activities and opportunities for adults and children to learn new skills all at the same time.

Earlier this year WHO brought into sharp focus the need to address Oral Health - with its links to chronic diseases - and countries are urged to address those shared risk factors, and to shift their focus to the prevention of oral health disease and away from traditional curative approaches. 

45% of employers in the UK said that they were less likely to recruit candidates living with obesity. Furthermore, people living with obesity have lower starting pay, lower co-worker ratings and lower hiring success. Read a summary of Institute for Employment Studies Stephen Bevan's talk about how women living with obesity are discriminated against in the workplace.

At C3, we’re dedicated to helping people make three fundamental changes to their lives:  Stop using tobacco  Approve their diet  Take more physical exercise  All of these habitual changes are crucial to helping prevent the 71% of deaths around the world caused by non-communicable diseases every year.   Exercise  There is a reason sports medicine doctor Jordan Metzl described exercise as a miracle drug in 2013. The physical health benefits are well-documented and unparalleled. Regular exercise slows the loss of bone density in older adults, decreasing risk of hip fractures. It decreases the risk of several cancers including lung, colon, breast, oesophagus and kidney. It lowers blood pressure... Read More

E-cigarettes continue to be a polarising issue across the public health world, as was evidenced during an exchange between two public health experts at C3’s most recent workplace health webinar run in partnership with the Society of Occupational Medicine.  On Tuesday, 21 September 2021 we invited Martin Dockrell, the Tobacco Control Lead at Public Health England to speak to us about the often-divisive subject of e-cigarettes. Dockrell began by outlining the consensus reached in the UK since 2008 on nicotine harm reduction following a contemporaneous report by the Royal College of Physicians. He showed that since the advent of e-cigarettes in 2012, rates of smoking among adults in the UK have... Read More

Project Prevention in Action aims to address gaps and barriers in knowledge among healthcare providers about the everyday challenges that low-income, disenfranchised, marginalised populations experience, particularly those who identify as Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and/or people living with chronic diseases, when attempting to engage in healthy and active living.

One of the chief risk factors of NCDs is tobacco use, which accounts for over 8.7 million deaths every year, while over 1.2 million deaths are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke (Ritchie and Roser, 2021). In 2017, one fifth of the population of China, Denmark, Netherlands, Greece, Bosnia and Greenland died from smoking.

On August 26th of each year, the United States celebrates Women’s Equality Day. The date was selected to commemorate the 1920 certification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote. Its purpose is, in the words of former President Barack Obama, to “pay tribute to the trailblazers and suffragists who moved us closer to a more just and prosperous future“.   But what does a more just and prosperous future for women mean in the context of public health? It may surprise you to know that there remain some very significant disparities in health outcomes for women, compared to men of the same age, race... Read More

World Senior Citizens’ Day is celebrated annually on the 21st of August and its purpose is to raise awareness of issues affecting older people such as health deterioration, as well as to celebrate the contributions of elderly people to society. According to a report published by the United Nations in 2019, there were 703 million persons aged 65 years or over in the world that year. The number of older persons is projected to double to 1.5 billion in 2050. The health of older people is increasingly important in all countries. At C3, our vision is a world where people aren’t dying of... Read More

Today is International Youth Day, a day for bringing into focus and considering issues surrounding young people across the globe.   At C3, our vision is a world where people aren’t dying of preventable chronic diseases, because they are finding it easier to live healthier lives. We work to bring together different individuals and communities to create changes which help people:  Stop using tobacco  Improve what they eat and drink  Take more physical exercise  Each of these habitual changes are most effective in the young, firstly because they have more life ahead of them than people of other age groups and secondly because when we... Read More

On Thursday, August 5 2021, the Royal Society of Medicine held the 85th event in its series on the Covid-19 pandemic, where it invites panellists from a wide range of fields to speak about their perspectives on the health crisis. This particular event focused on health inequalities in the pandemic. Hosted by Prof. Sir Michael Marmot, the guest speakers were Dr Habib Naqvi, Director of the NHS Race and Health Observatory, Jo Bibby, Director of Health at the Health Foundation, and Dr Bola Owolabi, Director of Health Inequalities at NHS England. Speaking first, Jo Bibby pointed out that her research... Read More

Obesity rate in France Obesity has doubled in France during the last 25 years. The new national epidemiological survey on overweight and obesity by  Obepi-Roche (2020) presented last week by “la Ligue contre l’obésité” showed obesity has increased significantly since the last Obepi-Roche survey (2012), 8 years ago. The survey, which involved 12,000 French participants, is also the first report of its kind to study paediatric obesity. The medical definition for overweight and obesity is based on the body mass index (BMI). BMI is measured in units of kg/m2. A BMI below 18.5 is considered underweight, above 25 is considered... Read More

C3 today acknowledges the anniversary of the arrival of the Windrush at Tilbury in 1948. It heralded the enormous, the continuing, and the highly valuable contribution that generations of healthcare professionals of Caribbean provenance were going to make to the NHS in the UK, and without whom the NHS would not have been able to deliver its massive impact on the health of the nation over the past 73 years. C3 is proud to be involved in maximising the health of our nursing workforce, in all of its diversity, in 2021. We do this in a multitude of ways, most... Read More

The biggest reason for nurses being absent from work due illness in England, Scotland and Wales is mental ill-health. In Northern Ireland, it is the second-biggest reason. C3’s nursing programme aims to develop strategies to promote the wellbeing of the nursing workforce. Our ongoing work to address the healthy weight of nurses has led to the significant consideration and analysis of nurses’ mental wellbeing. In 2020, commentary describing concerns about nurses’ mental health and wellbeing had reached a crescendo. A review of the literature describing the poor mental health and wellbeing of the nursing workforce was conducted by the Society... Read More

Our Nursing Minds campaign to highlight the continued neglect of nurses’ mental health has sparked plenty of interest. Nursing Times followed up its own survey of nurses’ mental health with a news story on 9 April  about C3’s Policy Paper. NT’s survey had found that almost two-thirds of nurses felt their mental health had deteriorated during the pandemic and that national well-being support was still not good enough. This was followed the next week in NT by a comment piece by Tom Sandford, author of the policy paper. Tom wrote: ‘I look forward to us all having the confidence to... Read More

  On Thursday the 3rd of June, 2021, C3’s CEO, Christine Hancock joined the George Institute for Global Health to give a talk on: ‘Smoking in the time of COVID: Challenges and opportunities in Australia and the United Kingdom’ to mark World No Tobacco Day 2021. Speaking alongside others including Prof. Martin McKee of LSHTM and Dr. Sarah White at the Cancer Council Victoria, she touched on a number of issues including the effects of tobacco addiction pushing economically vulnerable people into poverty, and the still-high profile of smoking as an associated risk factor in premature deaths in the UK.... Read More

Over a million people are currently living with dementia in the United Kingdom. Memory problems are one of a number of symptoms that people with dementia may experience. Others include difficulties with planning, thinking things through, struggling to keep up with a conversation, and sometimes changes in mood or behaviour. Dementia is not a natural part of ageing and it doesn’t just affect older people. Over 40,000 people under 65 in the UK have dementia. This is called early-onset or young-onset dementia. Dementia’s risk factors The seven main risk-factors of dementia are: Diabetes Midlife high blood pressure Midlife obesity Physical... Read More

The Lay of the Land Commentary on concerns about nurses’ mental health and well-being has reached a crescendo. This started in the spring of 2020 with the RCN Foundation funded Society of Occupational Medicine review of the breadth of the literature describing the poor mental health and wellbeing of the nursing workforce. It progressed through to the RCN Foundation commissioning Suzie Bailey, the Kings Fund director of leadership, to review that related literature from a leadership perspective. Her report, The Courage of Compassion, published in September 2020, set out an action plan to direct a series of related recommendations. They... Read More

We invite nurses and HCAs living in the London boroughs of Brent, Ealing and Harrow to join our new project: Nurses and Carers for Health. 

Recently, England’s Chief Medical Officer gave a speech to audience members attending a series of lectures around public health at London’s Gresham College. Prof. Chris Whitty opened by noting that people should feel absolutely no shame or embarrassment about obesity. It is purely something to be concerned about from a medical point of view and it was through this lens that he would be discussing the subject. He began his presentation by stating the urgency of the situation: obesity in the UK has increased from 15% of the population to 26% of the population in just two decades. The Association... Read More

The challenge  Obesity threatens public health and is associated with decreased life expectancy and quality of life. Childhood obesity mostly continues into adulthood and leads to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancer at a younger age. Moreover, with the worldwide spread of severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), obesity and impaired metabolic health emerged as important determinants of severe COVID-19 illness [1]. Over 340 million children and adolescents aged 5-19 were overweight or obese in 2016 with a prevalence among this age range from just 4% in 1975 to just over 18% in 2016 [2]. Once considered a high-income country problem, the prevalence of childhood obesity is now rising in low- and middle-income countries despite continuing levels  of undernutrition... Read More

C3's University of Notre Dame intern, Rafael Kuc, answers: how much have college students been impacted by lack of physical activity? How does a lack of physical activity impact other aspects of life like sleep or performance in class? Is there a way to keep active despite the pandemic?

As part of our project Nursing Minds, C3 has conducted surveys with 248 respondents about their experiences in nursing and the intersection of nursing and mental health.

We are proud to announce our first four nominees for C3 ESTEEM, our new initiative to capture and recognise nurses’ achievements during the pandemic and its aftermath. We are seeking nominations for individuals or teams who, during COVID-19, are exemplifying “nurses for health” and doing great things to support healthy lives for themselves, their colleagues, patients, families, or others in their communities.

Nursing Minds is one of C3 Collaborating for Health (C3)’s current projects working to support the mental health needs of UK nurses and midwives.

We're concerned about the escalating evidence that the mental health of our UK nurses is at risk and that more needs to be done to support them. Nursing Minds will engage nurses and leaders in developing a mental health toolkit and exploring barriers to and facilitators of protecting the mental wellbeing of heroic nurses during COVID-19 and beyond.

C3 is thrilled to be launching its brand new series of online Workplace Health Breakfast seminars this Autumn in partnership with the Society of Occupational Medicine and RAND Europe.

Because the menopause is so often misunderstood or overlooked, women going through it often don’t know how it affects their body, and that they may be at higher risk of developing non-communicable diseases (NCDs). This blog attempts to shed some light on the link.

2020 is Florence Nightingale's bicentennial year, designated by World Health Organisation (WHO) as the first ever global Year of the Nurse and Midwife. Announced early last year, WHO can have little idea how 2020 would start for the world’s nurses. As COVID-19 sweeps across every continent, a very contagious virus with no cure and little treatment, the skills of nurses are shown to the world as rarely before.

Thank you nurses for all that you do.

Coronavirus has moved rapidly from China through South East Asia and into Europe, the Middle East and the Americas.  Each country has tackled the pandemic in its own but different ways and research studies are being quoted to justify different approaches.  However, some of the facts now emerging are pointing to problems that will outlive the virus, which we need to remember.

Just 2 weeks ago we at C3 were moving forward with a fairly packed agenda of innovative ideas to prevent chronic (non-communicable) disease or NCDs. While we all worry about the impact of the virus on our friends and families we will also take the time to reflect on our work.

Although not as nationally renowned as Christmas or Easter, National No Smoking Day (11 March), is a day worth celebrating. C3's intern, a US university student, shares the differences between the smoking and vaping culture in the US and UK. Here in the UK, e-cigarettes seem to be advertised largely as a healthier alternative to smoking and a way to achieve smoking cessation. In the US, however, the story is quite different.

Here at C3 Collaborating for Health, we try to look at issues that impact nursing, but which generally don’t generate enough mainstream commentary, despite being serious concerns for nurses and the health community. It’s remarkable that so little has been done to reduce the incidence of this distress.

People tend to assume cancer is mainly passed down through families, but genetic factors only play a major role in 5% - 10% of all cancer types. In fact, most cancers are caused by DNA mutations that occur during a person’s lifetime due to environmental factors. Did you know that alcohol – even in moderation – has been linked to cancer as one of those factors?

With 10,000 steps as the goal for healthy living, we might assume that it’s the magic number to help eliminate our risk for heart disease, clear up our skin, give us the body of Beyoncé... right? Well turns out there is less scientific evidence to the magic number than we might think. Only now are researchers beginning to look into the effects of achieving 10,000 steps a day.

Each new year the Internet explodes with overwhelming advice about becoming better, healthier versions of ourselves. Here are C3's 5 simple tips for a healthy new year.

A growing number of employers are recognising the benefit of raising alcohol awareness in the workplace – not because they suspect employees are drinking on the job, but because they believe it is just as valuable to promote a healthier relationship with alcohol as it is to promote a healthy diet and exercise. Not convinced? Here are 10 reasons why every employer should be promoting Alcohol Awareness.

It is a common trope in global health that young people should be involved in discussions, research and policy development – but often youth representation is a tokenistic afterthought, with middle-aged ‘experts’ dominating the conversation. How can we better engage young people?

Sometimes people say they don’t understand why we do certain things but we are true to our core mission to create changes that make it easier for people to stop smoking, improve what they eat and drink and do more physical activity.

Why should we, as public health and healthcare advocates, care about a climate initiative?

“Frustrated” was the word used several times to describe the mood of people interested in combatting NCD (non-communicable disease) at a meeting at Chatham House last week.

Google ‘Health and Wellbeing providers in the UK' and you will find over 40 million to choose from. Is it time for a system of accreditation for this burgeoning industry? Find out more in this article written by C3’s workplace health associate Jane Abraham and published on the People Management website. 

5,300 nurses from 140 countries met at the International Council of Nurses (ICN) Congress in Singapore. C3 enjoyed a high profile at the event, with C3 director Christine Hancock (former ICN president) giving a keynote and meeting with the WHO Director General.

C3's new film about nurses' health elicited very positive to very uncomfortable feedback. C3's director Christine Hancock explains how the film came to be and why addressing nurses' health is an uncomfortable but necessary topic.

C3's long-standing supporter and Empactis Director Employee Health, Dr Steve Boorman, shares his thoughts after attending the launch of our film about supporting nurses' health in collaboration with Human Story Theatre and Nice Tree Films.

Florence Nightingale, the founder of professional nursing, was about heath and prevention as much as treating sickness, and the world needs her here now to preach her message.

Missed the London debut of The Wellbeing Symposium? Read about lessons learned and where to access speakers' presentations.

Viewers have shared Tasty videos, BuzzFeed's "hands and pans" approach to cooking demonstrations, on social media over 800 million times. How are these videos affecting food choices and nutrition awareness?

Do we really have to suffer through exercise or can it be fun? C3's director responds to Barbara Ellen's opinion piece 'Let’s stop pretending exercise is fun. Like work, you’ve just got to do it.'

This was a really unusual and enjoyable week which started in the smart offices of a multinational finance company where I was supporting a successful small business which shares our passion for health and wellbeing.

In support of No Smoking Day on Wednesday 13th March 2019, C3's intern summarises what progress the UK has made so far in the field of smoking cessation.

This International Women’s Day, we’re celebrating three of the amazing women key to C3’s success.

How to reduce sugar consumption? Produce less! The UK needs less and dearer sugar. Here are 5 ways the UK can do this, from C3 network member Professor Jack Winkler's new publication.

No sign of Spring yet in London but this week has been full of optimism with wonderful people offering us their time and support as well as amazing belief that we should think really BIG!

What makes C3's community-engagement programme unique? An innovative, evidence-based approach that shifts decision-making to local communities by engaging them as ‘citizen scientists’ in an investigation about their health and the built environment.

C3's director Christine Hancock details the interesting organisations she's met this week in her inaugural "Director's Diary" post.

C3's intern reflects on her habits and explores if there is a link between frequent caffeine consumption and the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD).

A new report tells us that Britain’s High Streets are getting unhealthier. The Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) studied 70 major UK towns and cities, and measured the healthiness of different types of shops and businesses on the high street.