Improving Trust, Confidence and Systems to Integrate Fitness with Healthcare [Podcast Series]
[:55] Dr. Bantham introduces her guest, Ken Griffin
Ken Griffin is Chief Executive Officer of AUSactive.
[1:09] An outsider’s perspective on the health & fitness industry
“We have social determinants of health dictating how whole societies actually age well or age poorly, how they develop chronic diseases or not develop chronic diseases, and it's rare to see the progress on the social determinants of health, despite it being discussed at every single health conference. Because ultimately, the things that affect social determinants of health sit outside the health system. They just see the symptoms of it. And this is the issue, everything outside the system is kind of in the blind spot, just like this entire sector of exercise and active health is.”
[4:41] Understanding the language of healthcare
“It's not often that the healthcare system actually has someone putting up its hand and going, hey, we've got not just a solution, but we've actually got a sustainable population-wide solution. And that we can bring to the table here, because there are very few levers that the health system can pull in a heavily regulated, highly costly environment that is constrained by so many different things, whether it's workforce, whether it's funding, whether it's regulatory structures. There are so many things that hold the health system back, and we're here, but we're in its blind spot, literally, we're just out of view.”
[11:11] Presenting the industry value proposition to consumers and healthcare
“What we know in Australia is that when someone gets intentional about exercising, one in two, so 50% of them, will choose a gym. Now that means there's one in two who don't, and then they're probably walking past the walls of gyms every day because there's so many of them, and they don't, it's just wallpaper to them. They don't see the benefit. And that's exactly what's happening when we interact with the health system at the moment too. We actually have to, as a sector, get better at radiating out into the community so people understand the expertise we bring, the benefit we can bring…”
[16:58] Building trust and confidence through accreditation
“And so we are going to have to raise the bar, and we're probably going to have to look at things like what will make it acceptable for health professions to confidently, and health systems and governments who are funding it to actually, include us in health, because there is a higher duty of care every single time. And we need to be aware of that and respect that. And that might mean that we have to have accredited professionals and accredited programs. We might even have to have accredited sites for them to be in, but we need to sort of make sure that that's within a judicious framework, because, once again, we shouldn't be medicalizing exercise, but we do need to make sure that in providing that, that confidence is there.”
[26:35] Innovating in healthcare and fitness integration
“We are still the only thing that I can see that is genuinely a public health and population based solution that costs the government nothing as far as capital investment or infrastructure, because it's already there. What we do is really just need to improve that trust, confidence and the systems that connect and we're ready to go.”
