Health professionals are asked to offer pregnant women and families applying for the Healthy Start scheme with relevant advice on breastfeeding and healthy eating. Basic information on breastfeeding and healthy eating is also given in the Healthy Start user guide, welcome magazine sent to all new Healthy Start beneficiaries, and on the publicly available Healthy Start website.
The Government have committed £75 million to a three year marketing campaign, “Change4life Programme” which aims to provide families with the information, tools and support that they will need to help their children lead healthier lives. The programme will include a help line, website, printed information, advertising and public relations, specialist materials for ethnic minority communities and resources for professionals to use with the public. The campaign will address those areas—including healthy meal suggestions, ideas for family activity, tips and strategies for getting children to eat more healthily—where parents said they needed support and guidance.
On 21 March 2007, we launched Top Tips for Top Mums a new 5 A DAY-Just Eat More (Fruit and Veg) campaign to help families get more fruit and vegetable into their children’s diets. The campaign aims to help families by sharing real tips from real mums on how they got their kids to eat more fruit and vegetables.
The Department also runs campaigns to motivate and support smokers to stop, and these are particularly targeted at routine and manual smokers, and their families. The messages through the motivation work focus on the impact of smoking on family life. For example, a new campaign was launched in June 2008, called ‘Wanna be like you’, which highlighted to parents that smoking will dramatically increase their children’s chances of becoming smokers too.
Since September 2006, we have been running a social marketing programme to ensure that people know the consequences of drinking, by raising awareness of the importance of sensible drinking and making sure people know what units are and therefore know how much they are drinking.
The level of public concern about how much alcohol young people are drinking in their teenage years is growing. The Youth Alcohol Action Plan (YAAP) sets out the evidence that shows that there is reason to be concerned and how Government will address this issue.
Part of the YAAP is establishing a new partnership with parents. This includes providing them with advice and guidance concerning young people and alcohol, which will include clear guidelines about how consumption of alcohol can affect children and young people produced by the Chief Medical Officer, and evaluation of family based interventions to assess if they are improving outcomes and reducing risks with those affected by alcohol misusing parents.