A Charleston mum-of-two has been hailed as ”an inspiration” by the board of NHS Tayside.
Members praised Jackie Hughes (42) for embodying the spirit of all they are trying to achieve in working with local communities to diminish the health gap between rich and poor.
Jackie told a meeting of the board on Thursday that Charleston Healthy Action Troopers (CHAT) evolved from a group of young mums who met when they collected their children from nursery.
That was around 10 years ago and Jackie has never looked back. She and friend Suzy Parkinson have since qualified as fitness instructors and CHAT now offers a wide range of activities from aerobics and Tai Chi to Zumba and salsa, as well as organising family day trips in the summer.
Her own children Ashley and Liam are now 22 and 14 respectively but she has clear memories of those school runs.
”A lot of the mums were single and isolated and the only time they met people was when they picked up their kids from nursery,” she said.
They started arriving half an hour early to have coffee together and were then approached by the Sure Start group which was running in the school and asked if they would be interested in attending gym sessions, she explained.
Once the nine-week programme ended, they had no instructor and were back to square one.
”We didn’t know what to do because we wanted to keep going,” said Jackie. ”So we continued by ourselves and for a year and a half we had the same music and the same routines.”
News of their activities spread quickly and they were asked to give demonstrations at gala days and school events ”and the group got bigger and bigger.”
Then, in 2004, the Dundee Healthy Living Initiative got on board and after 18 months of training Jackie and Suzy became fully qualified aerobics instructors.
CHAT is now based at Charleston Community Centre and offers ”low-cost or no cost” fitness classes.
”If it wasn’t for Dundee Healthy Living Initiative we would all still be just sitting in the house not having friends and not having any healthy thoughts going on,” Jackie added.’Wonderful’She had been invited to speak to the board as part of an update on the work of the initiative (DHLI). Board member Ruth Leslie Melville said her story was ”absolutely inspiring.”
She continued: ”It is wonderful to hear that this is happening and help is being given where it is needed, but not only that that people we are approaching are contributing and doing great things themselves.”
Fellow board member John Angus said CHAT represents ”the ideal model of collaboration” and a move away from the paternalistic approach of ”doing for” towards ”doing with.”
He added: ”The challenge is how do we roll this out?”
Board chairman Sandy Watson told Jackie: ”If we could bottle what you have and sell it the health service would have no problems.”
The meeting also heard from DHLI team leader Sheila McMahon, who spoke on the project in general and on the Equally Well initiative Stobswellbeing.
DHLI works in a ”holistic” manner to improve physical, mental and social wellbeing, she explained.
She said 80 different activities are now offered in disadvantaged communities each week, ranging from cooking on a budget to fitness classes and help to quit smoking – an area in which DHLI has had some success, with 44% of participants still non-smokers after a month, compared to a national figure of 25%.
Chief executive Gerry Marr pointed out that many of the community initiatives were at the mercy of non-recurring funding and said the health authority would be ”taking a hard look at that for the coming year.”
The board agreed that it should look to build on the work of DHLI and Stobswellbeing to reduce health inequalities in Dundee.