Background
- In December 2024, London Sport agreed a formal collaboration with London’s Health and Care Partnership and NHS England London to strengthen the integration of physical activity within health and care across the capital.
- In July 2025, the Government’s ‘Fit for the Future: 10 Year Health Plan for England’ set context for how physical activity might contribute to a more prevention-focused, person-centred NHS.
- Between July and October 2025 London Sport engaged over 150 colleagues from across London’s healthcare and physical activity sectors to co-develop the ‘London Fit for the Future’ Framework.
- Insights from this work aligned with the national ‘Moving Together’ project and we therefore agreed to combine efforts with the APNO to develop a draft framework and accompanying System Review Tool for integrating physical activity within health and care.
About the Framework
- The framework is based around seven ‘system enabling’ components from the ‘Moving Together’ project. Each represents a different layer required to truly embed physical activity across the system.
- The seven components are:
- Policy: the guidelines that shape decision-making and influence delivery standards
- Decision Makers: the strategic planning, funding, and coordination of support and opportunities
- Partnerships: the collaborative relationships between organisations working toward shared goals
- Workforce: the people involved in care pathways, their delivery, and the support they provide
- Monitoring & Evaluation: the collection and analysis of data to understand what’s working
- Communications: the sharing of information, feedback, and learning across the system
- Technology: the digital tools and systems that support delivery and evaluation
- Using insights from our co-development process, each component is broken down further into outcomes, 19 in total, describing what good looks like in practice.
London data
- 30 London boroughs completed the System Review Tool.
- Policy and Partnerships are the most mature components.
- Using data and insights to drive improvements is one of the strongest outcomes.
- However, there are some areas that could be improved:
- Technology is the least mature component, and a system-wide focus on strengthening digital infrastructure, workforce capability, and patients’ confidence in using digital tools is needed
- Work needs to be done to strengthen the generation of high-quality and reliable physical activity data
- Whilst physical activity is becoming more prioritised in health and care, co-investment into long-term physical activity initiatives is limited
- Within the workforce component, the health and care workforce’s understanding of the value of physical activity and the NHS workforce being supported to be physically active are areas for improvement