Five Ways to Wellbeing is a Buckinghamshire wide communications campaign that launched in April 2012 to encourage the general adult population to improve their mental wellbeing.

Eleven organisations across Buckinghamshire, including the district and county councils, NHS, Bucks Sport and voluntary sector have worked together to implement a co-ordinated  campaign across Buckinghamshire to promote the Five Ways to Wellbeing and promote existing programmes, facilities and events which related to each of the five themes.

From the pre evaluation which sought people’s awareness of the Five Ways to Wellbeing, the results are encouraging.  A range of people from the general adult population contributed to the 265 responses that were received on line. 

Headline results showed that:

• 36% of respondents had heard of the Five Ways to Wellbeing but 58% had not, yet high numbers of people specified that they carried out some of the five actions within their daily lives, indicating that the link between what they were doing and it’s benefit to their mental wellbeing was perhaps not well known. 
• Walking to be active and studying for a qualification to keep learning were the two most popular actions done by respondents.  However, the results show there are clear opportunities to promote alternative activities which promote wellbeing other than those listed by respondents.
• Locally created logos and symbols for the campaign were favourably received, with 75% recognising the Five Ways logo and 68% strongly agreeing that the wellbeing symbols matched the actions they represented. 
• Of those who responded 66% agreed to being contacted again for follow up surveys, giving us a great baseline on which to further evaluate this campaign. 

Next steps: our midway survey
Now that the Five Ways to Wellbeing campaign has officially launched in Buckinghamshire we want to measure and evaluate how much impact the campaign has made. To help us do that we have created a new survey, and invite you to take part here: https://bit.ly/Np6sGB

Please take five minutes or so to complete the survey feel welcome to share the link with others and invite them to take part too. We had a great response to our first short survey and we’d be delighted if we could repeat that success this time around.

If you want to know more about Five Ways to Wellbeing visit: www.buckinghamshire.nhs.uk/wellbeing